If you are unable to protect yourself from a tyrant, how can you protect your family? And how does a proud man live with that knowledge?

The Weight of a Mustard Seed is the intimate, startling and gripping account of the slow destruction of a man, his family and his country. General Kamel Sachet was a decorated hero of the long Iran-Iraq war and a favourite of Saddam Hussein’s. He was also a devoted family man; his sons and daughters revered him, depended on him and suffered for him. In the end they would also grieve for him, when Sachet realized, too late, the degree to which he was a participant in the terror regime that had strangled his country and suffocated its people.

In The Weight of a Mustard Seed, Wendell Steavenson pieces together – intricately and sensitively – the stories of Kamel Sachet, his wife, his sons and daughters, his friends and neighbours under Saddam’s long and gruelling tyranny. It is quite unlike any other book ever written on Iraq. The Weight of a Mustard Seed sears the heart and pierces the soul.