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City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death and the Search for Truth in Tehran

City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death and the Search for Truth in Tehran
  • Author(s): Ramita Navai
  • Location(s): Tehran
  • Genre(s): Nonfiction
  • Era(s): Modern

Welcome to Tehran, a city where survival depends on a network of subterfuge. Here is a place where mullahs visit prostitutes, drug kingpins run crystal meth kitchens, surgeons restore girls’ virginity and homemade porn is sold in the sprawling...

My Uncle Napoleon

My Uncle Napoleon
  • Author(s): Iraj Pezeshkzad
  • Location(s): Iran, Tehran
  • Genre(s): Fiction
  • Era(s): 1940s

In the early 1940s, the 15-year-old narrator becomes infatuated with his first cousin Layli. She is the daughter of the narrator’s uncle,nicknamed Napoleon because of his eulogising of the great French leader. Iranian, yes, but universal too, a great...

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Reading Lolita in Tehran
  • Author(s): Azar Nafisi
  • Location(s): Tehran
  • Genre(s): Autobiography/Memoirs
  • Era(s): Late 1900s

For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Azar Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. They were all former students whom she had taught...

Whirlwind

Whirlwind
  • Author(s): James Clavell
  • Location(s): Tehran
  • Genre(s): Fiction, Historical
  • Era(s): 1979

“Whirlwind” is the story of three weeks in Tehran in February 1979: three weeks of fanaticism, passion, self-sacrifice and heartbreak. Caught between the revolutionaries and the forces of international intrigue is a team of professional pilots. They are ordered...

Children of the Jacaranda Tree

Children of the Jacaranda Tree
  • Author(s): Sahar Delijani
  • Location(s): Tehran
  • Genre(s): Fiction
  • Era(s): 1983 and late 2000s

Tehran, 1983. A city paralysed by fear, its people silenced. And the beating heart of the regime is Evin prison. Yet even within its walls three women dare to dream of a life beyond tyranny. Azar gives birth to her...

Farangi Girl

Farangi Girl
  • Author(s): Ashley Dartnell
  • Location(s): Florida, Tehran
  • Genre(s): Autobiography/Memoirs
  • Era(s): 1960s onwards

Ashley Dartnell’s mother was a glamorous American, her father a dashing Englishman, each trying to slough off their past and upgrade to a more romantic and exotic present in Iran. As the story starts, Ashley is eight years old...

Prisoner of Tehran: One Woman’s Story of Survival Inside a Torture Jail

Prisoner of Tehran: One Woman’s Story of Survival Inside a Torture Jail
  • Author(s): Marina Nemat
  • Location(s): Tehran
  • Genre(s): Autobiography/Memoirs
  • Era(s): 1980s onwards

‘Nemat tells of her harrowing experience as a young Iranian girl at the start of the Islamic revolution. In January 1982, the 16-year-old student activist was arrested, jailed in Tehran’s infamous Evin prison, tortured and sentenced to death. Ali,...

Ali and Nino: A Love Story

Ali and Nino: A Love Story
  • Author(s): Kurban Said
  • Location(s): Azerbaijan, Georgia (Asia), Tehran
  • Genre(s): Fiction, Historical
  • Era(s): Russian Revolution (1917-18)

Ali Khan is an Islamic boy from Azerbaijan with his ancestors’ passion for the desert and warrior legends, but his lover Nino, a beautiful Christian girl from Georgia, is the child with a more European sensibility. Close to one...

Appointment in Tehran

Appointment in Tehran
  • Author(s): James Stejskal
  • Location(s): Tehran
  • Genre(s): Fiction, Thriller
  • Era(s): Modern

When radical Iranian students seize the U.S. Embassy compound in Tehran and take over fifty diplomats hostage the U.S. President has to negotiate with a government that wants only to humiliate the United States. When talks fail, the President...

Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran

Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran
  • Author(s): Azadeh Moaveni
  • Location(s): Tehran
  • Genre(s): Autobiography/Memoirs
  • Era(s): 2005 onwards

Azadeh Moaveni, longtime Middle East correspondent for Time magazine, returns to Iran to cover the rise of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Living and working in Tehran, she finds a nation that openly yearns for freedom and contact with the West...

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