The proofs for the cover of my first novel, Burden of the Desert, arrived this week. It was a strange experience to see them — exciting, certainly, but humbling too, to think that this story I have carried in my head for so long will soon be a book. Looking at them, I thought of that night long ago when the idea for the novel first came to me in a hotel room in occupied Baghdad.

It was 2004 and I could hear the sounds of the city outside my window, the traffic, the constant gunfire, the American helicopters passing low overhead. It was a remarkable time to be in Iraq, the whole world was watching, and we were right at the eye of the storm. And it came to me, standing at that hotel window, that across the city, across its hot streets teeming with intrigue, there was an American soldier my age, trying to get his platoon home alive. And a few more streets across, perhaps on the other side of the Tigris river, there was an Iraqi insurgent my age, who wanted to kill the American — and probably wanted to kill me too.

And deeper into the city, an innocent victim of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse. And, further on, an Iraqi who wanted nothing to do with the violence, in a secret love affair that would be pulled apart as community turned on community and the country descended into civil war.

I realised then how we journalists, who thought we were telling the story of Iraq, were only telling a tiny part of it — we had become a part of it after all, hunted through the streets by kidnappers who wanted to behead us.

But those other people stayed with me and solidified in my mind, until I could feel them with me everywhere I went in Iraq. Until I wanted to tell their stories — to tell all of our stories in Iraq: the reporters, the soldiers, the insurgents, the victims, the people just trying to survive. Burden of the Desert is my attempt to tell those stories.

And now, eight years later, it’s being published.

UPDATE SEPTEMBER 2013 — Burden of the Desert is currently available as a Kindle e-book in the USA and Canada. A new edition will be published in the UK in early 2014.