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Successful International Lawyer Writes Thriller About Iraqi Refugee

FT. COLLINS, Colo., April 22 /PRNewswire/ -- International lawyer D.J. Murphy was so touched by his refugee asylum cases that he gave up a successful law practice to write an emotional thriller about an Iraqi refugee. Entitled "A Thousand Veils," the novel tells the harrowing story of Fatima Shihabi, a journalist for Babel, Baghdad's largest newspaper. Marked for death by Saddam's secret police, she flees Iraq through the desert, only to discover that no country -- including the USA -- will grant her asylum. New York lawyer Charles Sherman, a 9/11 survivor, goes to extraordinary efforts to save her life.

Murphy said, "For 25 years I served as legal counsel for major international companies, handling a few refugee cases from the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, and the Middle East on the side. The refugees were fleeing persecution, imprisonment, torture, and sometimes certain death in their native countries, yet each time I found it agonizingly difficult to secure refuge for them in America. My heroine Fatima is under constant threat of death, but Charles encounters mountains of bureaucracy when he tries to get her asylum. Her poignant story rivets the reader who wonders if she can ever survive to live her dream in America."

The novel also touches a humanitarian nerve: the current Iraqi refugee crisis. According to Murphy, "We've triggered the worst humanitarian catastrophe since World War II, with about 2.2 million people forced out of their country and 2.7 million displaced within Iraq. These people are living in the worst possible conditions. Angelina Jolie, Goodwill Ambassador for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, has made two recent trips to Iraq in order to highlight their plight. The main source of help for these refugees is extremist militia groups. Besides our moral responsibility to act, it's in our own self-interest to help them."

"A Thousand Veils" is unique in its account of the profound love between a strong, fiercely independent woman of the Muslim faith and a successful partner of a major Wall Street firm -- a veritable "Master of the Universe" in Tom Wolfe's parlance. "As a novelist," Murphy said, "I employ their love to point the way, in a world beset by deep cultural misunderstanding, toward eventual reconciliation and synthesis between Islam and the West."

Early in his career, Murphy himself had been an attorney with a prestigious Wall Street firm. Assigned to an important Saudi Arabian client, he commuted between the Kingdom and the firm's Paris office. "During 22 trips to Saudi Arabia, I developed great respect for the Muslim religion, Arab culture, and the Arab peoples," says Murphy. "That respect is, I hope, reflected in the novel."

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