David Mogo Godhunter

Winner of the 2020 Nommo Ilube Award (an all Africa-based award) for Best Novel

A celebration of Nigerian mythology turning multiple genres on their head to create a completely new mash-up of Nigerian God-punk, David Mogo Godhunter is like nothing you've ever read…

Lagos will not be destroyed

The gods have fallen to earth in their thousands, and chaos reigns. Though broken and leaderless, the city endures.

David Mogo, demigod and godhunter, has one task: capture two of the most powerful gods in the city and deliver them to the wizard gangster Lukmon Ajala.

No problem, right?

“This story is captivating!” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“It's a fun, fresh ride brimming full of adventure. Wholeheartedly recommend if you love Zen Cho, Tade Thompson, or Nnedi Okorafor.” —Jager

“Vivid, visceral and with a strength of the voice that just pulls you right in. The god-littered world of David Mogo's Lagos just won't let go.” —Ng

“Assured, arch, and thoroughly enjoyable—an auspicious debut from one of the most promising new voices in the growing coterie of African writers.” —Wired Magazine

“A Nigerian Harry Dresden. Okungbowa's voice is great, and makes Lagos feel familiar.” —Jacey Bedford, author of Winterwood

(Group read suggestion from Beth McCrea, book club co-founder.)

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Dear Senthuran

Featured on the cover of Time Magazine as a 2021 next generation leader

In critically acclaimed novels, Akwaeke Emezi has introduced readers to a landscape marked by familial tensions, native belief systems, and a boundless search for what it means to be free. Now, in this extraordinary memoir, the bestselling author of The Death of Vivek Oji (view on Amazon) reveals the harrowing yet resolute truths of their own life. Through candid, intimate correspondence with friends, lovers, and family, Emezi traces the unfolding of a self and the unforgettable journey of a creative spirit stepping into power in the human world. Their story weaves through transformative decisions about their gender and body, their precipitous path to success as a writer, and the turmoil of relationships on an emotional, romantic, and spiritual plane, culminating in a book that is as tender as it is brutal.

Electrifying and inspiring, animated by the same voracious intelligence that distinguishes their fiction, Dear Senthuran is a revelatory account of storytelling, self, and survival.

“A once-in-a-generation voice.” —Vulture

“One of our greatest living writers.” —Shondaland

“A thing of great beauty . . . Dear Senthuran is about powerful excellence, especially the excellence that appears in bodies that aren’t white and aren’t male. Emezi is changing the world and our reaction to this kind of power.” —The Paris Review

“An audacious sojourn through the terror and beauty of refusing to explain yourself.” —New York Times Book Review

“The brilliant Akwaeke Emezi candidly shares their reflections on gender, embodiment, queerness, creativity and relationships with the same fierce dedication and candor that defines their bestselling novels.” —Ms. Magazine

(A special thank you to book club member, Heather Purcell for the suggestion.)

Note: Great on audio—read by the author herself!

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Things Fall Apart

Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Achebe’s critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa’s cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man’s futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political and religious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order.

With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.

“[Achebe] is one of world literature’s great humane voices.” —Times Literary Supplement

“A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.” —Barack Obama 

“Achebe’s influence should go on and on . . . teaching and reminding that all humankind is one.” —The Nation

“The first novel in English which spoke from the interior of an African character, rather than portraying the African as exotic, as the white man would see him.” —Soyinka

“The Founding Father of the African novel in English.” —The Guardian

(Group read suggestion from Julie Jacobs, book club moderator.)

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Migrations

Amazon Editors' Pick for Best Book of the Year in Fiction

Franny Stone has always been the kind of woman who is able to love but unable to stay. Leaving behind everything but her research gear, she arrives in Greenland with a singular purpose: to follow the last Arctic terns in the world on what might be their final migration to Antarctica. Franny talks her way onto a fishing boat, and she and the crew set sail, traveling ever further from shore and safety. But as Franny’s history begins to unspool—a passionate love affair, an absent family, a devastating crime—it becomes clear that she is chasing more than just the birds. When Franny's dark secrets catch up with her, how much is she willing to risk for one more chance at redemption?

Epic and intimate, heartbreaking and galvanizing, Charlotte McConaghy's Migrations is an ode to a disappearing world and a breathtaking page-turner about the possibility of hope against all odds.

“Visceral and haunting” (NY Times Book Review) · “Hopeful” (Washington Post) · “Powerful” (Los Angeles Times) · “Thrilling” (TIME) · “Tantalizingly beautiful” (Elle) · “Suspenseful, atmospheric” (Vogue) · “Aching and poignant" (Guardian) · “Gripping” (The Economist)

“At times devastating and, at others, surprisingly, undeniably hopeful...Brimming with stunning imagery and raw emotion, Migrations is the incredible story of personal redemption, self-forgiveness and hope for the future in the face of a world on the brink of collapse.” —Shelf Awareness

Note: Great on audio!

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Exit West

Finalist for the Booker Prize & winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize for Fiction & the Aspen Words Literary Prize
 
A New York Times bestseller, the astonishingly visionary love story that imagines the forces that drive ordinary people from their homes into the uncertain embrace of new lands…
 
In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet—sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors—doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through. . . .

Exit West follows these remarkable characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. Profoundly intimate and powerfully inventive, it tells an unforgettable story of love, loyalty, and courage that is both completely of our time and for all time.

“A breathtaking novel…[that] arrives at an urgent time.” —NPR
 
“It was as if Hamid knew what was going to happen to America and the world, and gave us a road map to our future… At once terrifying and … oddly hopeful.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“Moving, audacious, and indelibly human.” —Entertainment Weekly, “A” rating

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The Yield

Written by a First Nations author (Wiradjuri)

Winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award & Kate Challis RAKA Award

Knowing that he will soon die, Albert “Poppy” Gondiwindi has one final task he must fulfill. A member of the indigenous Wiradjuri tribe, he has spent his adult life in Prosperous House and the town of Massacre Plains, a small enclave on the banks of the Murrumby River. Before he takes his last breath, Poppy is determined to pass on the language of his people, the traditions of his ancestors, and everything that was ever remembered by those who came before him. The land itself aids him; he finds the words on the wind.

After his passing, Poppy’s granddaughter, August, returns home from Europe, where she has lived the past ten years, to attend his burial. Her overwhelming grief is compounded by the pain, anger, and sadness of memory—of growing up in poverty before her mother’s incarceration, of the racism she and her people endured, of the mysterious disappearance of her sister when they were children; an event that has haunted her and changed her life. Her homecoming is bittersweet as she confronts the love of her kin and news that Prosperous is to be repossessed by a mining company. Determined to make amends and honor Poppy and her family, she vows to save their land—a quest guided by the voice of her grandfather that leads into the past, the stories of her people, the secrets of the river.

Told in three masterfully woven narratives, The Yield is a celebration of language and an exploration of what makes a place “home.” A story of a people and a culture dispossessed, it is also a joyful reminder of what once was and what endures—a powerful reclaiming of Indigenous language, storytelling, and identity, that offers hope for the future.

“Unmissable.” —The Guardian

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Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

From the author of the acclaimed A Case of Exploding Mangoes (view on Amazon) comes a subversively, often shockingly funny new novel set in steaming Karachi.

The patients of the Sacred Heart Hospital for All Ailments need a miracle. Alice Bhatti may be just what they’re looking for. She’s the new junior nurse, but that’s the only ordinary thing about her. She’s just been released from the Borstal Jail for Women and Children. But more to the point, she’s the daughter of a part-time healer in the French Colony, Karachi’s infamous Christian slum, and it seems she has, unhappily, inherited his part-time gift. With a bit of begrudging but inspired improvisation, Alice begins to bring succor to the patients lining the hospital’s corridors and camped outside its gates. But all is not miraculous. Alice is a Christian in an Islamic world, ensnared in the red tape of hospital bureaucracy, trapped by the caste system, torn between her duty to her patients, her father and her husband—who is a former bodybuilding champion, now an apprentice to the nefarious “Gentleman’s Squad” of the Karachi police, and about to drag Alice into a situation so dangerous that perhaps not even a miracle will be able to save them. But, of course, Alice Bhatti is no ordinary young woman . . .

At once a high comedy of errors and a searing illumination of the seemingly unchangeable role of women in Pakistan’s lower-caste society, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti is a resounding confirmation of Mohammed Hanif’s gifts of storytelling and of razor-sharp social satire.

“Relentlessly readable. A comedy for those who think, a tragedy for those who feel. . . . Hanif does Karachi better than Rushdie does Bombay.” —The Guardian

”Rambunctious, vulgar, funny, and moving, Alice Bhatti wields enormous emotional punch. . . The world could do with more books that portray Pakistanis this way.” —Time

“Belly-laugh-inducing. Sam Lypsyte funny. Faulty-Towers funny. The silliness is anarchic and profound...a ripping story and a rowdy piece of art.” —The New York Times

“An amusingly anarchic tale of Karachi life so alive with sensations that you can smell the sewers, hear the screeching of tyres, and feel the humidity.” —The Scotsman

(Group read suggestion from Sue Attalla, book club moderator.)

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Kartography

A love story with a family mystery at its heart, Kartography is a dazzling novel by a young writer of astonishing maturity and exhilarating style

Raheen and her best friend, Karim, share an idyllic childhood in upper-class Karachi. Their parents were even once engaged to one another’s partners, until they rematched in what they call “the fiancée swap.” But as adolescence distances the friends, Karim takes refuge in maps while Raheen searches for the secret behind her parents’ exchange. What she uncovers reveals not just a family’s turbulent history, but also a country’s—and now a grown-up Raheen and Karim are caught between strained friendship and fated love.

Kartography transports readers to a world not often seen in fiction: vibrant, dangerous, sensuous Pakistan.

“[Shamsie] packs her story with the playful evidence of her high-flying intelligence.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Deftly woven, provocative . . . Shamsie’s blistering humor and ear for dialogue scorches through [a] whirl of whiskey and witticisms.” —The Observer (UK)

“A shimmering, quick-witted lament and love story . . . Rich in emotional coloratura and wordplay.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

(A special thank you to book club member, Elke Richelsen for the suggestion.)

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The Lost Children of Paradise

A self-driving cargo container crashes in rural Pakistan. Inside are 46 kidnapped street children. A traditional who-done-it mystery, set against the unique backdrop of a futuristic Pakistan with two great main characters in a fun, engrossing read…

As a grizzled, semi-retired policewala (police officer) living in rural twenty-second century Pakistan, Officer Nawaz had long ago substituted any notions of heroism with a pretty impressive drinking habit. But when he comes across a crashed cargo container near his hometown carrying kidnapped street children, curiosity drives him to investigate. Fate pairs him up with Adil Khan, a young, idealistic, and rather annoying space cadet from the global Confederation. While most of the developed world looks to the stars, Pakistan finds itself embroiled in age-old problems. The two officers must face challenges at once unique and timeless in order to untangle the mystery of the kidnapped container children.

“What a gem! One rarely encounters a genuinely strong book on [US] Kindle Unlimited. This is one of them. The narrative, the characters, the plot, and the setting create a beautifully realized world that is both recognizable and strange. This is imaginative fiction at its best!” —Chandos

“Sparkling character development and world building—noir from a Pakistan several centuries ahead. Love the dialogue, love the plot.” —Dr. Bruce

“A refreshingly unique premise with excellent pacing. A thoughtful imagining of the Third World in the future.” —Hammond

(Group read suggestion from Beth McCrea, book club co-founder.)

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Moth Smoke

The debut novel from the internationally bestselling author of Exit West (view on Amazon) and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (view on Amazon), both shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize

Moth Smoke, Mohsin Hamid’s deftly conceived first novel, immediately marked him as an uncommonly gifted and ambitious young literary talent to watch when it was published in 2000. It tells the story of Daru Shezad, who, fired from his banking job in Lahore, begins a decline that plummets the length of Hamid’s sharply drawn, subversive tale.

Fast-paced and unexpected, Moth Smoke was ahead of its time in portraying a contemporary Pakistan far more vivid and complex than the exoticized images of South Asia then familiar to the West. It established Mohsin Hamid as an internationally important writer of substance and imagination and the premier Pakistani author of our time, a promise he has amply fulfilled with each successive book. This debut novel, meanwhile, remains as compelling and deeply relevant to the moment as when it appeared more than a decade ago.

“A subtly audacious work and prodigious descendant of hard-boiled lit and film noir… Moth Smoke is a steamy and often darkly amusing book about sex, drugs, and class warfare in postcolonial Asia.” –The Village Voice

“Friends, a love triangle, murder, criminal justice, hopelessness, humidity. It’s set in Lahore, there’s a beautiful woman. Her name is Mumtez and she smokes pot and cigarettes and drinks straight Scotch. Read this book. Fall in love.” –Publishers Weekly

(Group read suggestion from Gemma Ware, book club moderator.)

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The Pakistani Bride

Wild, austere, and magnificently beautiful, the territories of northern Pakistan are a forbidding place, particularly for women. Traveling alone from the isolated mountain village where he was born, a tribal man takes an orphaned girl for his daughter and brings her to the glittering city of Lahore. Amid the pungent bazaars and crowded streets, he makes his fortune and a home for the two of them.

Yet as the years pass, he grows nostalgic for his life in the mountains, and his fifteen-year-old daughter envisions a romantic landscape, filled with tall men who roam the mountains like gods. Impulsively, the man promises his daughter in marriage to a man of his tribe. But once she arrives in the mountains, the ancient customs of unquestioning obedience and backbreaking work make accepting her fate as the bride of an inscrutable husband impossible. Unfortunately, the only escape is one from which there is no return.

Prescient and provocative in its assessment of the plight of women in a tribal society in Pakistan, the first of Bapsi Sidhwa’s novels is a story of marriage and commitment, of the conflict between adherence to tradition and indomitable force of a woman’s spirit.

“At a breathless pace [Sidhwa] weaves her exotic cliffhanger from passion, power, lust, sensuality, cruelty and murder.” —Financial Times (UK)

“Bapsi Sidhwa is a powerful and dramatic novelist who knows how to flesh out a story.” —London Times (UK)

(A special thank you to book club member, Eydis West for the suggestion.)

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The Wandering Falcon

Longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize

A haunting literary debut set in the forbidding remote tribal areas.

Traditions that have lasted for centuries, both brutal and beautiful, create a rigid structure for life in the wild, astonishing place where Pakistan (and Afghanistan) meet-the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). It is a formidable world, and the people who live there are constantly subjected to extremes-of place and of culture.

The Wandering Falcon begins with a young couple, refugees from their tribe, who have traveled to the middle of nowhere to escape the cruel punishments meted out upon those who transgress the boundaries of marriage and family. Their son, Tor Baz, descended from both chiefs and outlaws, becomes “The Wandering Falcon,” a character who travels among the tribes, over the mountains and the plains, into the towns and the tents that constitute the homes of the tribal people. The media today speak about this unimaginably remote region, a geopolitical hotbed of conspiracies, drone attacks, and conflict, but in the rich, dramatic tones of a master storyteller, this stunning, honor-bound culture is revealed from the inside throughout these short stories.

Jamil Ahmad has written an unforgettable portrait of a world of custom and compassion, of hardship and survival, a place fragile, unknown, and unforgiving.

“[Ahmad] proves a masterful guide to the landscape and to the captivating art of storytelling at its finest. This is a shadowy, enchanting journey…. A gripping book, as important for illuminating the current state of this region as it is timeless in its beautiful imagery and rhythmic prose.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“[A] rare and sympathetic glimpse into a world that most Westerners know only through news reports related to military operations…. A fascinating journey; essential reading.” —Library Journal, starred review

(A special thank you to book club member, Jordi Valbuena for the suggestion.)

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Summers Under the Tamarind Tree

Winner Best First Book, Gourmand World Cookbook Awards

Summers Under the Tamarind Tree is a contemporary Pakistani cookbook celebrating the varied, exciting and often-overlooked cuisine of a beautiful country. In it, former lawyer-turned-food writer and cookery teacher Sumayya Usmani captures the rich and aromatic pleasure of Pakistani cooking through more than 100 exotic yet achievable recipes. She also celebrates the heritage and traditions of her home country and looks back on a happy childhood spent in the kitchen with her grandmother and mother.

“Open this spellbinding cookbook, and its stunning photographs will instantly cast you away to the bustling markets, street food stalls and generously-laden dinner tables of Pakistan. Usmani garnishes her recipes with charming anecdotes about her childhood in Pakistan. This book is an unprecedentedly authentic snapshot into the culinary culture of this often overlooked country.” ―The Independent

“My favourite sort of cookbook: personal, beautiful and full of things I want to eat.”―Meera Sodha

”This book is a treasure. Charm, information and what Sumayya calls ‘the flavour of my Pakistani heritage’ permeates every single recipe. It's an excellent book both for armchair-reading and for its detailed recipes.” ―Jaffrey

“A cookbook to covet…fascinating, visually appealing and filled with tales, childhood memories and plenty of insight into inspiring, traditional dishes from Pakistan.” ―Grazia Magazine

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Stars Uncharted

In this rip-roaring space opera, a ragtag band of explorers are out to make the biggest score in the galaxy.

On this space jump, no one is who they seem . . .

Captain Hammond Roystan is a simple cargo runner who has stumbled across the find of a lifetime: the Hassim, a disabled exploration ship–and its valuable record of unexplored worlds.

His junior engineer, Josune Arriola, said her last assignment was in the uncharted rim. But she is decked out in high-level bioware that belies her humble backstory.

A renowned body-modification artist, Nika Rik Terri has run afoul of clients who will not take no for an answer. She has to flee off-world, and she is dragging along a rookie modder, who seems all too experienced in weapons and war.

Together, this mismatched crew will end up on one ship, hurtling through the lawless reaches of deep space with Roystan at the helm. Trailed by nefarious company men, they will race to find the most famous lost world of all–and riches beyond their wildest dreams.

“A fun adventure novel with an irresistible ragtag crew.” —The Washington Post

“An absorbing space opera, in the tradition of The Expanse and The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.” —Charles Stross, award-winning author

“[A] brilliant female-driven tale…Readers of Asimov, Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga, or Anne McCaffey’s Pern series will enjoy this story.” —Booklist (starred review)

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Terms of Enlistment

The year is 2108 and the Commonwealth is bursting at the seams. For welfare rats like Andrew Grayson, there are only two ways out of the crime-ridden and filthy welfare tenements: You can hope to win the lottery and draw a ticket on a colony ship settling off-world . . . or you can join the service.

With the colony lottery a pipe dream, Andrew chooses to enlist in the armed forces for a shot at real food, a retirement bonus, and maybe a ticket off Earth. But as he starts a career of supposed privilege, he soon learns that the good food and decent health care come at a steep price . . . and that the settled galaxy holds far greater dangers than military bureaucrats or the gangs that rule the slums.

“There is nobody who does [military SF] better than Marko Kloos. His Frontlines series is a worthy successor to such classics as Starship Troopers, The Forever War, and We All Died at Breakaway Station.” —George R. R. Martin

“Military science fiction is tricky because it either intends to lampoon the military industrial complex or paints it in such a way that you must really have to love guns to enjoy the work. Terms of Enlistment walks that fine line by showing a world where the military is one of the few viable options off a shattered Earth and intermixes it with a knowledge of military tactics and weapons that doesn’t turn off the casual reader.” —Buzzfeed

“Much like Scalzi’s Old Man’s War and its sequels, Terms of Enlistment and Lines of Departure are combat-grade military SF, and should come with an addiction warning.” —io9

“Frontlines is earnest, optimistic, and fun, even as it deals with subject matter that’s intrinsically grim. It’s a story that strikes the perfect balance between escapism and serious reflection, and it’s the perfect military sci-fi series to escape into for a week or two.” —The Verge

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The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree

Shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prizer

From the pen of one of Iran’s rising literary stars, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree is a family story about the unbreakable connection between the living and the dead.

Set in Iran in the decade following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, this moving, richly imagined novel is narrated by the ghost of Bahar, a thirteen-year-old girl, whose family is compelled to flee their home in Tehran for a new life in a small village, hoping in this way to preserve both their intellectual freedom and their lives. But they soon find themselves caught up in the post-revolutionary chaos that sweeps across their ancient land and its people. Bahar’s mother, after a tragic loss, will embark on a long, eventful journey in search of meaning in a world swept up in the post-revolutionary madness.

The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree speaks of the power of imagination when confronted with cruelty, and of our human need to make sense of trauma through the ritual of storytelling itself. Through her unforgettable characters, Azar weaves a timely and timeless story that juxtaposes the beauty of an ancient, vibrant culture with the brutality of an oppressive political regime.

“If ever there was a book that needs to be read more than once, this is it.” —ArtsHub

“[Azar’s] book is a great journey. It moves places and it moves us as readers, in an emotional and intellectual sense.” —The Los Angeles Review of Books

(Group read suggestion from Gemma Ware, book club moderator.)

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My Persian Paradox

On a cold night in 1978, seven-year-old Shabnam Shahmohammad clung to her mother in a Tehran apartment while the sounds of gunshots rang out in the street: The Iranian Revolution was at hand. She and her family survived that night, but as the Islamic fundamentalists took the power over, she grew up watching her father take his beloved books away to burn, his friends be arrested and disappear, and women like her mother grow ever more marginalized. Confused by her father’s communist ideology, her mother’s conservative religious beliefs, and the regime’s oppressive rules, she developed a deep longing to live a different life.

Finding herself being married at 19, she naively dreamed to team up and discover an adventurous life. When she gave birth to a daughter whose future, she realized, mattered more to her than her own, she had to find a way to unlock her little girl’s possibilities. She longed to emigrate, but with Western countries’ embassies mostly absent from Tehran, options for escaping Iran were limited.

My Persian Paradox is a tale of resilience facing oppression and dictatorship along with fighting with narrow traditional and restrictive cultural rules. This memoir is a journey of self-discovery, mother-daughter relationship obstacles, forbidden love, and the universal desire for freedom.

”The difference between Shabnam's choices and those of many Iranian women lies in her determination to realize her dreams against all odds: dreams that evolve into a bid for freedom under impossible circumstances … Shabnam's survey of past and present ideals and their impact on her ability to assimilate makes for an engrossing survey that goes beyond most immigrant stories.” —Midwest Book Review

(Group read suggestion from Gemma Ware, book club moderator.)

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My Uncle Napoleon

The most beloved Iranian novel of the twentieth century

“God forbid, I’ve fallen in love with Layli!” So begins the farce of our narrator’s life, one spent in a large extended Iranian family lorded over by the blustering, paranoid patriarch, Dear Uncle Napoleon. When Uncle Napoleon’s least-favorite nephew falls for his daughter, Layli, family fortunes are reversed, feuds fired up and resolved, and assignations attempted and thwarted.

First published in Iran in the 1970s and adapted into a hugely successful television series, this beloved novel is now “Suggested Reading” in Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran. My Uncle Napoleon is a timeless and universal satire of first love and family intrigue.

“Howlingly funny . . . [a] tender and salacious Iranian import.” —Cleveland Plain Dealer

“A gift both to readers fascinated by other cultures and to lovers of fiction for fiction’s sake.” —The Washington Post Book World

”Readers can gain a more balanced impression of Iran from this novel, which looks at life from the kind of humorous perspective few Westerners may associate with the current regime in that country.” –The CS Monitor

“A masterpiece of contemporary world fiction.” –Baltimore Sun

“A giddily uproarious mixture of farce and slapstick.” –The Atlantic

(A special thank you to book club member, Eydis West for the suggestion.)

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Prisoner of Tehran

In her heartbreaking, triumphant, and elegantly written memoir, Marina Nemat tells the heart-pounding story of her life as a young girl in Iran during the early days of the brutal Islamic Revolution.

What would you give up to protect your loved ones? Your life?

In January 1982, Marina Nemat, then just 16, was arrested, tortured, and sentenced to death for political crimes. Until then, her life in Tehran had centered around school, summer parties at the lake, and her crush on Andre, the young man she had met at church. But when math and history were subordinated to the study of the Koran and political propaganda, Marina protested. Her teacher replied, “If you don't like it, leave.” She did, and, to her surprise, other students followed.

Soon she was arrested with hundreds of other youths who had dared to speak out, and they were taken to the notorious Evin prison in Tehran. Two guards interrogated her. One beat her into unconsciousness; the other, Ali, fell in love with her.

Sentenced to death for refusing to give up the names of her friends, she was minutes from being executed when Ali, using his family connections to Ayatollah Khomeini, plucked her from the firing squad and had her sentence reduced to life in prison. But he exacted a shocking price—with a dizzying combination of terror and tenderness, he asked her to marry him and abandon her Christian faith for Islam. If she didn't, he would see to it that her family was harmed. She spent the next two years as a prisoner of the state, and of the man who held her life, and her family's lives, in his hands.

Lyrical, passionate, and suffused throughout with grace and sensitivity, Marina Nemat's memoir is like no other. Her search for emotional redemption envelops her jailers, her husband and his family, and the country of her birth—each of whom she grants the greatest gift of all: forgiveness.

“Nemat's engaging memoir is rich with complex characters...[she] offers her arresting, heartbreaking story of forgiveness, hope and enduring love—a voice for the untold scores silenced by Iran's revolution.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

(Group read suggestion from Beth McCrea, book club co-founder.)

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Rooftops of Tehran

An unforgettable debut novel of young love and coming of age in an Iran headed toward revolution.

In this poignant, eye-opening and emotionally vivid novel, Seraji lays bare the beauty and brutality of the centuries-old Persian culture, while reaffirming the human experiences we all share.

In a middle-class neighborhood of Iran’s sprawling capital city, 17-year-old Pasha Shahed spends the summer of 1973 on his rooftop with his best friend Ahmed, joking around one minute and asking burning questions about life the next. He also hides a secret love for his beautiful neighbor Zari, who has been betrothed since birth to another man. But the bliss of Pasha and Zari’s stolen time together is shattered when Pasha unwittingly acts as a beacon for the Shah’s secret police. The violent consequences awaken him to the reality of living under a powerful despot, and lead Zari to make a shocking choice.

“Refreshingly filled with love rather than sex, this coming-of-age novel examines the human cost of political repression.” –Kirkus

“Charmingly romantic…Seraji captures the thoughts and emotions of a young boy and creates a moving portrait of the history and customs of the Persians and life in Iran.”
–Publisher’s Weekly

(Group read suggestion from Sue Attalla, book club moderator.)

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