In 2003, the United States attacked Iraq, ostensibly to rid the country of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. The war destabilized the Middle East and resulted in Hussein’s death as well as the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
Helen Benedict’s latest novel, The Soldier’s House, focuses on the Iraq war, the turmoil it caused in the lives of one Iraqi family, and the American soldier who tries to help them.
The Soldier’s House is the final novel in Benedict’s Iraq war trilogy, which includes Sand Queen and Wolf Season. This second novel, the most ambitious of the three, occurs both in Iraq and in the United States; it focuses on both men and women, and tackles the effects of war. Even though a few of the characters appear in all three novels, one does not have to be familiar with the other books to appreciate The Soldier’s House.
As Benedict, a Columbia University professor of journalism, explained in an interview, she was born of American parents in London and remembers the fallout from World War II—rubble from bombed buildings and burned children’s toys—leaving her with strong anti-war sentiments. When the United States went to war with Iraq, she felt impelled to study war’s effects on people. She later wrote The Lonely Soldier, a nonfiction book about women in war, in 2009 and a play, “The Lonely Soldier Monologues,” in 2011.
The Soldier’s House begins with a poignant epigraph: “To the children who have lost life, limbs, family and a future to war,/ And to the hope that the powerful will stop killing you.”
The story features 5-year-old Tariq, who lost his leg as a bomb exploded in Iraq, and his family. They arrive in the United States without their father and breadwinner, Khalil, who was killed in a car bombing because he worked as a translator for U.S. soldier Jimmy Donnell and was considered a traitor by his fellow Iraqis. When the narrative begins, his widow Naema, his son and his mother Hibah come to upstate New York to live with Donnell in an uneasy peace.
Khalil and Donnell had seen each other as brothers, with each saying to Naema that she wouldn’t understand the bond between them. The theme of brotherly love reverberates throughout the story and includes Donnell and his two brothers, Patrick and Rory. Jimmy, the oldest, practically raised his brothers. When he joined the Army to make enough money for their college education, he sent them to live with their Aunt Maureen, a devout Catholic.
Donnell feels fatherly toward Tariq and considers Naema a sister. The novel also has religious motifs like atonement and forgiveness that give the plot a spiritual dimension.
Benedict makes several references to Catholic and Muslim prayer in the novel and suggests the Iraqi family are practicing Muslims, while Donnell is a nonpracticing Irish Catholic. His wife, Kate Brady, who also served in Iraq, is Catholic, attends Mass and says grace before meals. Both religions call for love, mercy and kindness rather than revenge. But as the novel develops, both Iraqis and American characters are unable to follow this commandment.
Donnell’s seven years fighting in Iraq taught him to hate the Iraqis. It was Donnell’s job to teach his troops discipline and instill his men with a team spirit and loyalty—which he did successfully. When he returns home, he has post-traumatic stress disorder and feels like a misfit, somewhat reminiscent of Harold Krebs, protagonist of Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Soldier’s Home,” whose title and plot seem to have inspired Benedict.
Donnell’s wife Kate is a female version of Krebs. Like Krebs, she cannot adjust to being home and resents her family—especially her mother. She decides to leave her husband, parents and sister without telling anyone where she is or why she has left. One of the mysteries embedded in the story is whether she will reconcile with her family.
Some of the slower scenes in the novel occur in the United States, while the most vivid ones occur in Iraq—as when Naema watches her father and brother being arrested and wrongly held in an American prison. Kate, whom Naema meets in Iraq, promises to help her find them. In one especially memorable section, Naema sees Kate in the United States and remembers waiting in the hot desert outside the prison where her father and brother are held to learn whether they were alive. “The more she absorbs Kate’s presence…the more she feels again the devastation of that news when it came.”
Naema is especially galled when she remembers U.S. politicians saying they were liberating Iraq rather than causing death and chaos. Donnell is consumed by guilt, which is why he brings Naema to the United States, where he tries to make it all up to her.
The book contains alternating points of view from first person to third across its 19 chapters, with each chapter picking up the thread of an earlier chapter and blending stories in a cinematic way. Each describes a scene and advances the plot while flashing back to an earlier event. Chapter 11, for example, is told in the third-person, limited-omniscient point of view. It shows the brotherly relationship between Khalil and Donnell. It also reverberates with Tariq’s loss of his father, as Donnell (who inserts himself into the story) writes a letter of condolence to the widow of a dead American soldier and his eight orphaned children.
Benedict has an ear for poetry, and she infuses this novel with metaphors, parallelism and irony. Benedict describes Naema’s father as a poet and references his work, as when Naema bends to kiss her son good night and remembers lines from his poem: “Rest from the running, now, my child/ And sleep while you can./ We have wars to lose/ And wars to win.” Benedict also acknowledges poems written by actual Iraqi poets who, she says, inspired this novel.
The poetry sometimes spills over into chapters told from Donnell’s point of view. He has a job interview at Saint Paul’s Academy, a Catholic boys’ school, and notices a chapel that “sags like an exhausted nun under the weight of its oversized steeple.” During the interview, he has trouble keeping his mind from “spinning into darkness.”
Ultimately, this disquieting anti-war novel feels like it holds as much darkness as the Iraq war itself.
This article appears in November 2026.
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