Set in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk during the 1950s, The Last of the Angels tells the slyly humorous tale of three strikingly different people in one small neighborhood: the revolutionary Hameed Nylon, the butcher Khidir Musa, and a young boy named Burhan Abdullah who discovers an old chest that lets him talk to angels. By turns satiric, picaresque, and apocalyptic, the novel paints a loving and elegiac portrait of Kirkuk in the final years of Iraq’s monarchy—a moving tale of growing up in a dangerous world.