Should all family secrets be unearthed? How can one live with one’s ghosts? Such is Taymour’s quest in The Sky is Immense, a masterful odyssey between Paris, Baghdad, and Krasnodar, from the 1960s to the 2000s, following in the footsteps of his legendary pilot uncle, who mysteriously disappeared.

“The sky is immense, Mom, am I going to get lost?” This is what Adel wrote to his mother in 1967. An exceptional pilot, the young Iraqi was sent by the Air Force to be trained in the USSR, before disappearing in 1974, between Baghdad and Krasnodar…

Thirty years later, his nephew Taymour can no longer bear the secrecy surrounding his uncle, this hero whose absence weighs heavier than legend. Is he dead or gone, victim or fugitive? Relentlessly, fighting against the silence of a family and a regime, Taymour will question his family, read his uncle’s notebooks, and decipher every photo of Adel on his MiG21.

“When it snows in Baghdad,” is what they say in Iraq about something that will never happen. And yet, in the tracks left by Adel in the snow upon his arrival in the USSR, there must be a thread to be pulled, one of those threads of love and blood that keep even men who dream of the sky and elsewhere grounded.

Feurat Alani, born in Paris in 1980, was awarded the Prix Albert-Londres, France’s most prestigious journalism prize, in 2019 for his graphic novel Le Parfum d’Irak (Arte Editions/Editions Nova 2018) which was translated into German and Arabic. He is the author of the critically acclaimed debut novel Je me souviens de Falloujah which was published in English by Other Press and was the winner of multiple prizes: Prix de la littérature Arabe, Prix du Roman Version Femina, Prix Amerigo Vespucci and the Prix Senghor.