Fiction ripped from headlines faces notorious risks. It may be dated by the time it is published; it may pale beside reportage. Most dangerously, fact may become a crutch for the novelist’s imagination.

But if a timely fiction succeeds, the result may be riveting. Yasmina Khadra’s story of a vengeful Iraqi youth, “The Sirens of Baghdad” (Nan A. Talese, 307 pages, $19.95), follows current events faithfully. Mr. Khadra, a former Algerian officer whose real name is Mohammed Moulessehoul, begins his story in Beirut, where Prime Minister Hariri has recently been assassinated. Then the narrator, a young unnamed Bedouin, flashes back to his native village. He remembers how life changed in the 1990s, under the embargo, and the tragedies caused by the mismanaged oil for food program.

The incidents that transform our hero into a potential suicide bomber are newsworthy. The first sees a mentally unstable boy, the village mascot, shot down by American soldiers at a routine checkpoint stop. The boy, terrified by a black GI, panics, and tears off into the desert. The GI likewise panics and starts shooting.

Our narrator, a witness to the shooting, is deeply affected:

The first gunshots shook me from my head to my feet, like a surge of electric current. And then came the deluge. Utterly dazed, I saw puffs of dust, lots of them, bursting from Suleyman’s back, marking the impact points. Every bullet that struck the fugitive pierced me through and through.

Mr. Khadra’s simple language conveys the toughness of the Bedouin life as well as its innocence. Even the narrator’s clichéd rhetoric — the electric current, the piercing “through and through” — embodies a modest integrity.

Alongside this language, we are introduced to the wonderfully conservative ethos of his village. To leave the circle of tradition and concomitant innocence is to lose a kind of moral birthright:

The young people of our village were too pious to venture into big cities, where their ancestral blessing had no jurisdiction, and where the devil was at work, nimbly perverting souls.

Such a prelapsarian vision might be difficult to accept, if Mr. Khadra did not show how quickly innocence turns to hate. The turning point in the novel comes when the narrator glimpses his father’s penis in the chaos of a nighttime raid, the third crisis that Operation Iraqi Freedom brings to this particularly unlucky village.

For the narrator, seeing beneath his father’s nightshirt compromises everything.

A Westerner can’t understand, can’t suspect the dimensions of the disaster. For me, to see my father’s sex was to reduce my entire existence, my values and my scruples, my pride and my singularity, to a coarse, pornographic flash.

After this, the narrator’s simple language carries an undertone of dumb resistance. Contradictions flourish, but, tellingly, the novel’s style cannot address them directly. Mr. Khadra’s achievement is to catch the instantaneousness of innocence and vengeance in the stubbornness of prose.

After a sojourn in Baghdad, where he makes terrorist connections, the young narrator is waiting in Beirut to embark on a suicide mission in the West. Dr. Jalal, an intellectual who has decided to champion the most murderous factions of the Iraqi insurgents, teases the terrorist recruit for his prudishness. He hints that the narrator might see the world differently if he accompanied Dr. Jalal to a brothel. The reader may almost want to agree with Dr. Jalal on this point, but, in one of the delicate ironies that balances his novel, Mr. Khadra makes Dr. Jalal’s own sensuality depressing, a kind of tracksuited nihilism.

It would be hard to imagine a more convincing novelistic treatment of terrorism today. Yet we must admit that Mr. Khadra answers the riddle of hate in a way that sits well with us: It becomes a problem of stubbornness and sexual immaturity. “I concentrate on the lights of the city,” says the young man in his moment of truth, “which I was never able to perceive through the anger of men.”

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Mona Yahia’s novelistic memoir of growing up in Baghdad in the 1960s, “When the Grey Beetles Took Over Baghdad” (George Braziller, 358 pages, $22.50), pictures a green city, a placid backdrop for furtive adolescent adventures, barely spoiled by a whiff of danger. This whiff, evident first in the sketchy men who stalk the narrator on a truant afternoon by the Tigris, becomes a stench as Ms. Yahia’s episodic narration builds up to a harrowing conclusion: that the city’s ancient Jewish population must leave. Written in a stiff but rich English, Ms. Yahia’s memoir seeks out detail that will refresh our sense of the city. She learns to swim in the Tigris; her friends etch their names in their desks, carving from right to left. The challenge of exile, she suggests, is to maintain “intimacy with her environment.” Her memoir belongs to a different world, one in which Baghdad’s terrors come with a strong native historical consciousness.

blytal@nysun.com