Recommendations from our site
“It’s set in contemporary America. Or that’s where it begins, but it is dealing with the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution. You have a family now based in America, but the ripples of what happened in the 1970s are still being felt through their family. There are a lot of strong women in this book. They live the high life. But there are lots of fractured family dynamics, which is always a rich source of humour. And sharp dialogue, the repartee between them. It’s a family situation that goes badly wrong, with all of this history woven through it. So, again, it’s interesting because it deals with serious politics, a family who were significant in Iran, and who are now trying to recover that sense of whether or not they matter in contemporary America. But it’s the characters you get most involved with.” Read more...
Stephanie Merritt, Journalist
“It’s very funny, and it’s so unexpected. When I picked up the book, I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t want to read any blurb or reviews, I just came to the work very clean. So I thought, when I picked this up, that it would be a historical novel about the Persians. I expected a different country, a different time, a different culture. But then this opens and it’s like the Kardashians of Aspen. It’s told from lots of different points of view, of women within this family. And it’s a book about who they are now, now they’ve lost their money, their clout. How can they negotiate America as immigrants—and not powerful immigrants either.” Read more...
The Best Novels: The 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction
Kit de Waal, Novelist
