Drawn to the exoticism and mystery of names on a map of Iran – Isfahan, Shiraz, Meshed, Kerman, Khorassan – Michael Carroll embarked on a journey that took him through the heart of the country from the Taurus mountains...

The book is essentially a memoir of Shirin Ebadi’s life from the time she enters Tehran University and graduates as the top Law student up to when she she was representing the reporter Akbar Ganji as his lawyer.

In a direct, frank, and intimate exploration of Iranian literature and society, scholar, teacher, and poet Fatemeh Keshavarz challenges popular perceptions of Iran as a society bereft of vitality and joy. Her fresh perspective on present day Iran provides...

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...

Betty Mahmoody and her husband, Dr Sayyed Bozorg Mahmoody (‘Moody’), came to Iran from the USA to meet Moody’s family. With them was their four-year-old daughter, Mahtob. Appalled by the squalor of their living conditions, horrified by what she...

‘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,...

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...

Through northern China, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, then through Iran and into Turkey, Thubron travels away from the tourist trails, into the heartlands of the countries – the Gobi Desert, the lyrical descriptions of the mountain ranges…a 7,000 mile journey.

Set in seventeenth-century Iran, THE BLOOD OF FLOWERS is the powerful and haunting story of a young girl’s journey from innocence to adulthood. A village girl’s dreams of marriage end on the death of her father. Cast on the...

A young southern woman, Evelyn-also known as “E”-is confronted by a CIA officer, Nick, who says her mysterious lover is being investigated as a foreign mole. Shocked, she agrees to cooperate, secretly. E thus enters the international world of...