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The Septembers of Shiraz.

Article Excerpt
The Septembers of Shiraz. Dalia Sorer. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007. 352 pages. $24.95 cloth.

More likely than not, many readers are by now familiar with the multitude of Iranian American women's autobiographies with provocative titles such as Lipstick Jihad, Funny in Farsi, and the world-renowned Reading Lolita in Tehran. The better known and more widely read authors are those whose writings deal with issues related to women's experiences within Iran; inevitably, their criticisms of the Islamic regime find a larger interest and popularity with mainstream audiences. The reading public is not necessarily aware of the many works by authors such as Nahid Rachlin, Manoucher Parvin, Naveed Noori, and now, Dalia Sofer.

Sofer's debut novel, The Septembers of Shiraz, immediately jars the reader with the sudden arrest of its protagonist by officers of Iran's Revolutionary Guard. On September 20, 1981, without explanation and in the language of the Islamic Revolution, the prosperous jeweler Isaac Amin is calmly led away from his five-story office building and into one of Iran's most infamous prisons. Close on the heels of the 1979 coup and in the beginning stages of the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq War, this novel follows the psychological and emotional impact of a country in transition, mirrored by the...

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