The Prose Works of Gha’ib Tu’ma Farman is a welcome contribution to the growing number of studies about modern Iraqi literature. With it, Hilla Peled-Shapira joins the ranks of researchers who have sought to elucidate the role of Iraqi writers in the development of Arabic literature during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, scholars such as Muhsin al-Musawi, Orit Bashkin, Fabio Caiani, Catherine Cobham, Ikram Masmoudi, and Terri DeYoung. Peled-Shapira’s incisive and thoroughly researched study of Farman’s position as progenitor of the Iraqi novel does for scholarship on Iraqi prose what DeYoung’s 1998 Placing the Poet: Badr Shakir al-Sayyab and Postcolonial Iraq did for Iraqi poetry. That is, Peled-Shapira’s book focuses on a single writer to illuminate several aspects of Iraqi literature and society more broadly by combining biographical and literary analysis throughout. In the book’s four chapters, Peled-Shapira addresses Farman’s biography and the influence of leftist thought in his writing; the use of language (particularly the vernacular) and style in Farman’s work; the position of the intellectual in Iraqi society; and Baghdad’s special place in Farman’s oeuvre. The book, therefore, contextualizes Farman’s life and work in an engaging way that should be a useful model for future scholarship on Arabic literature, a field that is sorely lacking in similar book-length studies of individual authors, and specifically those that deal with Iraqi writers.