Best books on Iran: 5 reads beyond Persepolis and Reading Lolita in Tehran

If you are still not convinced that you need to read it, chew on this — the book opens with the sound of a fart–no, it is not a typo–and, of course, a formal investigation ensues.

Uncle, and his faithful servant Mash Qasem–the Sancho Panza to Uncle’s Don Quixote–recruit Germans via a code phrase involving mutton stew and Jeanette MacDonald, and treat every ambient sound as evidence of imperial surveillance.

There is also a love story as the teenage narrator, whose father Uncle absolutely deplores is in love with said Uncle’s daughter! Yikes!

The fact that Uncle is not completely wrong about Imperial powers is the novel’s central joke and its point. The book, and the TV series it inspired were banned after the Iranian Revolution. Of course they were.

2. The Blind Owl — Sadegh Hedayat (1937)

The book cover of The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat

Hedayat, who is considered the father of modern Persian fiction, wrote this novel in exile and distributed limited copies because he did not expect anyone to publish it. He was not wrong about the publishing but wrong about everything else. Surreal, claustrophobic, narrated by a man whose grip on reality loosens so gradually you don’t notice until you’ve lost yours too, The Blind Owl is preoccupied with death, obsession, and the slow dissolution of the self in ways that have nothing to do with geopolitics and everything to do with being human. It has been translated into dozens of languages. None of them quite get there, but read the translation anyway.

3. Disoriental — Négar Djavadi (2016)

The book cover of Négar Djavadi’s Disoriental. (Source: amazon.in)

There is a sentence early in the book that contains the whole of it. Kimiâ’s father, Darius–an Iranian intellectual in Parisian exile–refuses to take the escalator in the metro. When his daughter asks why, he says: “Escalators are for them.” In a review for The Brooklyn Rail, essayist and literary translator Shohreh Laici writes that Djavadi herself has identified this line as her original source of inspiration.

Djavadi, an Iranian-French novelist and National Book Award finalist, opens her debut in a Parisian fertility clinic, where her narrator Kimia Sadr sits waiting and reconstructing the multigenerational history of a family that fled Iran when she was 10. The novel does not explain Iran to you, but it also does not position you as a sympathetic outsider. It assumes you are keeping up, and the assumption is bracing.

4. The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree — Shokoofeh Azar (2017)

The cover of Shokoofeh Azar’s The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree

Azar, an Iranian-Australian novelist, wrote this book in Persian in secret and published it anonymously in Iran before it was translated into English and longlisted for the International Booker Prize. It is a magical realist novel about a family that retreats to a village in the mountains after the 1979 Revolution, narrated by a ghost. The ghost, 13, watches her family survive, and not survive, and the years that follow with the detached clarity that only the dead can afford.

5. White Torture — Narges Mohammadi (2022)

The book cover of White Torture by Narges Mohammadi. (Source: amazon.in)

Mohammadi, Iranian human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, compiled this book from inside Evin Prison, where she was serving one of several sentences handed down for the crime of writing and speaking about what she saw. White Torture collects the testimonies of twelve women held in solitary confinement. Mohammadi received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023 in absentia, from her cell, because she was not permitted to leave.