Five books that put you in Iran. Four are by writers from Iran and set there, starting with Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and Reading Lolita in Tehran. The other is a wider pick, by someone who knows the place well.
Poetry sits at the heart of Iranian culture: Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, the national epic, is still performed by storytellers, and Iranians quote Hafez in everyday life. Persian (Farsi) is the main literary language, though writers also work in Azeri Turkish, Kurdish and Armenian. Many now live abroad, so some of the best-known books were written in English or French.
Revolution, war, censorship and exile recur, often seen through women's lives. Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, first published in French, is a graphic memoir of growing up in Tehran through the 1979 revolution and the war with Iraq. Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran recalls the secret class in which she read forbidden Western novels with her students. Shahriar Mandanipour's Censoring an Iranian Love Story, translated from Persian, follows a writer battling the censor line by line, with struck-out sentences left on the page.
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Graphic memoir of growing up in Tehran through the 1979 revolution and the Iran-Iraq War, with war and veiling shaping daily life.
Memoir of a literature professor and her female students in post-revolutionary Tehran, showing censorship, university politics and private resistance.
Novel of a young couple in modern Tehran, told through a writer wrestling with state censorship and everyday constraints.
Memoir of a teenage girl imprisoned in Evin Prison after the revolution, depicting Tehran's political repression in the 1980s.
By long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well, or folk tales, poetry and history with a strong feel for Iran.
A love story set against 1953 Tehran's bookshops, political ferment and the coup against Mossadegh, followed by decades of Iranian exile.
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