An impressionistic memoir by the award-winning Iraqi-American writer, Dunya Mikhail, <i>Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea</i> covers her earliest sensations of childhood to a more complicated grasp of death, beginning with the death of her father to the Gulf War and the subsequent Iraqi War. Mikhail writes: “Death always looks for us. It comes from beyond the continents. It crosses long distances holding a basket of fire in its hand.” <br />