In August 2003, a 25 year old Iraqi woman calling herself Riverbend provided eyewitness accounts of the bombings, kidnappings and night-time raids by US soldiers that constitute daily life in Baghdad. Her journal has gathered a worldwide audience hungry for news unfiltered by the mainstream media.

Both personal and political, Riverbend writes of the impact on her family, of the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, of how the rights of women are falling victim to emergent fundamentalisms. Describing the reality of regime change in Iraq in a voice in turn outraged and witty, both hard-hitting and deeply moving, Riverbend bears witness to the events shaping the fate of her homeland.