While eleven-year-old Nazie has long been engaged to her cousin Moussa and anxiously awaits her marriage, fifteen-year-old Flora has been abandoned by her husband in the midst of a difficult pregnancy.
In a novel brimming with vitality and sensuality - smells, colours and textures float effortlessly off the page - Rabinyan examines the lives of these young Jewish girls in a Persian village at the beginning of the twentieth century. Persian Brides is a widely-acclaimed, vibrant and award-winning debut of immense emotional power.

The energy of the writing is remarkable . . . It is as if we have entered the wildest of Chagall's paintings. * * Literary Review * *
A remarkable (and well-translated) extravaganza. * * Sunday Telegraph * *
Bursting with colourful stories and superstitions, the narrative seems to embrace whole lives rather than just two days. . . Rabinyan has a fresh and charming voice. * * Independent on Sunday * *
Lush, lyrical and disturbing. . . Rabinyan's marvellously digressive style and rich prose give the story the feel of a night-long wedding feast. * * New York Times * *

DORIT RABINYAN was born in 1972 in Kfar Saba, Israel, to a Jewish family that had emigrated from Iran. Persian Brides is her first novel, which she wrote at the age of twenty-one, using her family stories. She has also written a book of poems and a second novel, Our Weddings (Bloomsbury, 2001).