Anna is shaken to discover her husband is a spy. Then he kidnaps their baby to war time Iraq. If Anna doesn’t unveil his hidden past, she may lose her daughter forever.

Soon after Anna gives birth to Zina, she knows the child is not her husband’s. And that she wants to spend her life with Zina’s real father, Davoud. Most of all, she wants to be away from the horrible secrets that her husband Karim kept from her, of which a glimpse already shocked her to the core.

That glimpse and his suspicions about her affair bring Karim to kidnap baby Zina, in this espionage romance set mainly in Amsterdam and Iraq. His jealousy and vengefulness in combination with his past as a spy make for such a deadly brew that Anna and her lover are forced into hiding.

When Davoud and Anna go to Iraq to look for their daughter, they find a country in disarray after bombing raids toppled the dictator. With their search for Zina getting ever more desperate, Anna realizes the time has come to disclose Karim’s hidden past.

Judit Neurink shows in The Jealous Spy not only her knowledge of Iraq and its people, but also her art to write suspenseful romance novels that contain close connections to real-life events. Neurink is a seasoned journalist and writer. She worked as a correspondent in Iraq for over a decade, where she reported on the rise and fall of the terror group ISIS. She published fiction and non-fiction, all about or situated in the Middle East.

Rose cannot believe her husband died in the Caliphate. Her lover goes to Iraq to find and rescue him. Will she now lose both to the violence of the terror group?

Rose is a teacher who went through a painful divorce. But she never thought her ex, Ahmed, would leave for the Caliphate and get killed there. Devastated and feeling betrayed, she finds solace and support in the strong arms of his best friend, Sam.

But then Sam is asked by the secret service to follow Ahmed into the Caliphate and work undercover for them. To both her surprise and dismay, Rose is contacted by Ahmed’s former slave. Through Dua, she discovers his diary from his time as an emir in the terror state. Rose now finds herself in the warm embrace of women who join her search for both Ahmed and Sam.

Suspense and romance are combined with real-life stories about resistance and survival in the ISIS Caliphate. Like those from yezidi-women like Dua who were kidnapped to become sex slaves, and the secret networks that rescued them.
Judit Neurink used her knowledge from her longtime reporting from Iraq and about the war on ISIS to tell the story of people who got caught up in the open-air prison of the Caliphate.

Which is the role of women in a radical Muslim group like ISIS? Did women fight and kill, in the state ISIS ran in Iraq and Syria? What happened to the women that ISIS kidnapped? How was life in general for women in the group’s caliphate?
Do you want to understand better what is the relation between radical Islam and women? How it is possible that women were joining ISIS by the thousands from abroad? That active western women agreed to a life at home, just as wives and mothers?

Then you need to read this book by acclaimed Dutch author and journalist Judit Neurink, who lived in Iraq for over ten years and reported on the arrival and departure of the ISIS regime for media in Holland and Belgium.

Slaves wives and brides shows the complex relationship between women and radical Islam. In the book, Neurink gives a voice to Yazidi women who escaped from the caliphate. She tells the story of the American add worker Kayla Mueller, who was the slave of ISIS-leader Al-Baghdadi. She paints a clear picture of daily life under ISIS rule for women in cities like Mosul and Raqqa.

With ISIS mostly defeated in Iraq and Syria, this book is a completely updated and edited version of Neurink’s book The Women of the Caliphate.

A Jewish girl suffers from anti-Semitic sentiments in the Iraq of the past century. A Kurdish girl finds her diary over sixty years later. What connects them?

Rahila grows up under the growing anti-Semitic threats of the 1940’s and loses her family and most people around her to the pull of Zionism and the state of Israel. She herself marries a Muslim, converts to Islam and stays in Iraq.
Zara is part of the Arab Spring movement in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and struggles to come to terms with her new-found, Jewish roots. She finds she is not the only one whose long forgotten past is looming heavily over her present and future.

Two women, living in two different eras, play the main parts in Judit Neurink’s novel situated in Iraq. Neurink, who lived in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq for ten years, brings to life the past Iraq has chosen to forget, of the Jews who for centuries made up the fabric of the society.

Using the stories of two strong women, she draws the pictures of Iraqi, Kurdish and Jewish families struggling to survive in a changing and often hostile world.

The Jewish Bride covers a chapter in Iraq’s history that is absent in what is taught in Iraqi schools and universities. While Jewish buildings and quarters have crumbled and all but disappeared, the knowledge about how Jews, Muslims and Christians used to live together in Iraq seems doomed to perish with the older generation. By telling these stories and mixing them with fiction, Neurink has made this lost past come alive again.

The writer is a Dutch journalist, who lived and worked in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq for over a decade. She wrote eight books, all about the Middle East, of which two novels. The Jewish Bride is available in Dutch, English and Kurdish. An Arabic translation is in the works.

Determined to put her past to rest, can she dig up her ex’s secrets without falling victim to a global plot?

Amsterdam. Susan is devastated. After believing she’d found her other half in a handsome colleague, the savvy international photojournalist goes to pieces when he brutally ends the relationship. Still a mess after three years, the scarred go-getter is stunned to discover the mediocre photographer has landed a position as a French minister.

Convinced she was just another pawn in a spy operation, Susan jets to Iraq seeking answers that may finally heal her broken heart. But when she unearths her former lover’s ties to the Kurdish resistance and damning revelations start piling up, the fearless woman finds herself in the crosshairs of those desperate to keep their secrets buried.

Will Susan’s hunger to find peace plant her in a shallow grave?

French Deception is an exhilarating espionage thriller. If you like intense characters, nail-biting action, and real-world power struggles, then you’ll devour Judit Neurink’s gritty tale.