Synopses & Reviews
Narrator Gladys Cailiff is eleven years old in 1938 when a new, well-traveled young schoolteacher turns a small Georgia town upside down. Miss Grace Spivey believes in field trips, Arabian costumes, and reading aloud from her ten-volume set of
The Thousand Nights and a Night. The real trouble begins when she decides to revive the annual town festival as an exotic Baghdad bazaar. Miss Spivey transforms the lives of everyone around her: Gladys's older brother Force (with his movie-star looks), her pregnant sister May (a gifted storyteller herself), and especially the Cailiffs' African American neighbor, young Theo Boykin, whose creative genius becomes the key to a colorful, hidden history of the South.
Populated by unforgettable characters — including three impressive camels — The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia rides a magic carpet from a segregated schoolroom in Georgia to the banks of the Tigris (and back again) in an entrancing feat of storytelling.
Review
"Stefaniak steals a page from Scheherazade herself, capturing the ordinary lives of the loving Cailiff family while also taking readers on multiple flights of fancy as she tells the complicated backstory of the camel driver. A novel fairly brimming with inventive storytelling and comic brio." Booklist
Review
"Young Gladys is a great narrator....A simple, often engaging tale..." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Wonderfully seductive, one of those rare books you disappear into wholly. It's joyous, shamelessly funny, heartbreaking, and page after page it gives you what you didn't expect. This is a novel you'll want to hand deliver to a friend." David Long, author of The Inhabited World
Synopsis
Populated by unforgettable characters including three impressive camelsThe Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia rides a magic carpet from a segregated schoolroom in Georgia to the banks of the Tigris (and back again) in an entrancing feat of storytelling. "
Synopsis
Stefaniak pens a big-hearted story of a Depression-era small town turned upside down by a worldly teacher.
Synopsis
A big-hearted story of a Depression-era small town turned upside down by a worldly teacher.
About the Author
Mary Helen Stefaniak is the prize-winning author of The Turk and My Mother, Self Storage and Other Stories, and The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia. She lives in Omaha and Iowa City.
Exclusive Essay
Read an exclusive essay by Mary Helen Stefaniak