Rumi’s poetry is fashioned into lyrical prose for children

In her thirties, Jennifer Klinec abandons a corporate job to launch a cooking school from her London flat. Raised in Canada to Hungarian-Croatian parents, she has already travelled to countries most people are fearful of, in search of ancient...

Growing up in a small fishing village in 1980s Iran, 11-year-old Saba Hafezi and her twin sister Mahtab are fascinated by America. They keep lists of English vocabulary words and collect contraband copies of Life magazine and Bob Dylan...

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...

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...

On a holy mountain in the depths of Persia there is a cave with a mysterious cuneiform carving deep inside it. Aga Akbar, a deaf-mute boy from the mountain, develops his own private script from these symbols and writes...

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...

The Story of a Childhood and The Story of a Return The intelligent and outspoken child of radical Marxists, and the great-grandaughter of Iran’s last emperor, Satrapi bears witness to a childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her...

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.