Friendship, betrayal, and international intrigue populate this brilliant novel in the tradition of Graham Greene and John le Carré. “Swift, hard-boiled novel . . . Shadowy zealots exist everywhere, whether in conference rooms or interrogation rooms or—most often—in rooms that can serve as both.” —New York Times Book Review “Abdoh paints a gripping portrait of a nation awash in violence and crippled by corruption. . . . Captivating.” —Publishers Weekly The year is 2008. Reza Malek’s life is modest but manageable—he lives in a small apartment in Harlem, teaches “creative reportage” at a local university, and is relieved to be far from the blood and turmoil of Iraq and Afghanistan where he worked as a reporter, interpreter, and sometime lover for a superstar journalist who has long since moved on to more remarkable men. After a terse phone call from his best friend in Iran, Sina Vafa, Reza reluctantly returns to Tehran. Once there, he finds far more than he bargained for: the city is on the edge of revolution; his friend Sina is embroiled with Shia militants; his missing mother, who was alleged to have run off with a lover before the revolution, is alive and well—while his own life is in danger. Against a backdrop of corrupt clerics, shady fixers, political repression, and the ever-present threat of violence, Abdoh offers a telling glimpse into contemporary Tehran, and spins a compelling morality tale of identity and exile, the bonds of friendship, and the limits of loyalty. Brand-new stories by: Gina B. Nahai, Salar Abdoh, Lily Farhadpour, Azardokht Bahrami, Yourik Karim-Masihi, Vali Khalili, Farhaad Heidari Gooran, Aida Moradi Ahani, Mahsa Mohebali, Majed Neisi, Danial Haghighi, Javad Afhami, Sima Saeedi, Mahak Taheri, and Hossein Abkenar. From the Introduction by Salar Abdoh: “There is something of both the absolutely spectacular and positively disgraceful about Tehran. But most writers around the world are inclined to think that their own sprawling metropolis is the capital of every imaginable vice and crime, of impossible love and tenderness and cruelty and malice in measures that seldom exist anywhere else. For me, Tehran’s case is no different—except that there really is a difference here. The city may be a hothouse of decadence, a den of inequity, all that. But it still exists under the watchful eye of a very unique entity, the Islamic Republic. The city enforces its own morality police, and there are regular public hangings of drug dealers and thieves. Because of this, there is a raging sense of a split personality about the place—the imposed propriety of the mosque rubbing against the hidden (and more often not so hidden) rhythms of the real city . . . There is always an element of the end of the world about this place. A feeling of being once removed from the edge of the precipice. Elsewhere I have called it the “Seismic City”—the seismic sanctuary. All of this will end one day. Yes. And maybe sooner than later. And when it does, by God, we will miss it.”
