The Gardens of Consolation
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
A novel of love, family, and a fight for freedom in Iran featuring a “formidable and hard-to-forget heroine” (Publishers Weekly).
In the early 1920s, in the remote Persian village of Ghamsar, two young people dreaming of a better life fall in love and marry. Sardar brings his bride, Talla, with him across the mountains to the suburbs of Tehran, where the couple settles down and builds a home. From the outskirts of the capital city, they will watch as the Qajar dynasty falls and Reza Khan rises to power as Reza Shah Pahlavi.
Into this family of illiterate shepherds is born Bahram, a boy whose brilliance and intellectual promise are apparent from a very young age. As he grows older, Bahram will become a fervent follower of reformer Mohammad Mosaddegh and will participate firsthand in his country’s political and social upheavals, putting himself in mortal danger, in this prize-winning, “compelling book [that] raises important questions about indulgence, gender, community, and the impact of politics on everyday life” (Kirkus Reviews).
“Exquisite . . . the narrative evolves from an intimate chronicle of Talla and Sardar’s provincial lives into a sweeping tour through early-20th-century Iran.” —The New York Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Iran's early 20th-century political upheavals drive this absorbing debut novel about a working-class couple and their gifted, socially ambitious son. The novel, by Iranian author Reza, opens in the early 1920s, with young newlyweds Talla and Sardar Amir traveling from their native Qamsar to the suburbs of Tehran, where Sardar has established himself as a shepherd. For the couple, who are illiterate and unworldly, the migration proves emboldening but also disorienting. Sardar is gripped by the "contained suffering that went by the name of exile," and Talla bristles at unfamiliar class hierarchies and fluctuating customs regarding chadors. They later move to Shemiran, where they raise a son, Bahram, who begins "breaking with continuity" of his parents' provincialism. Under a mandate from Reza Shah, Bahram begins attending school at six and quickly finds himself to be an avid pupil. After receiving his village's first high school diploma, Bahram goes on to attend the prestigious Tehran University, where he becomes involved in the National Front, a nationalist party. Reza, by weaving intimate domestic details with explications of Iran's shifting fortunes (the nationalization of the country's oil and the overthrow of Mosaddegh feature prominently here), succeeds in imbuing the Amirs' story with stirring sociopolitical importance. She is uncommonly generous to her characters, and Talla is a formidable, hard-to-forget heroine.
