A captivating, polyphonic novel of one family’s flight from and return to Iran.

1979. Behsad, a young communist revolutionary, fights with his friends for a new order after the Shah’s expulsion. He tells of sparking hope, of clandestine political actions, and of how he finds the love of his life in the courageous, intelligent Nahid.

1989. Nahid lives her new life in West Germany with Behsad. With their young children, they spend hour after hour in front of the radio, hoping for news from others who went into hiding after the mullahs came to power.

1999. Laleh returns to Iran with her mother, Nahid. Between beauty rituals and family secrets, she gets to know a Tehran that hardly matches her childhood memories.

2009. Laleh’s brother Mo is more concerned with a friend’s heartbreak than with student demonstrations in Germany. But then the Green Revolution breaks out in Iran and turns the world upside down …

A topical, moving novel about revolution, oppression, resistance, and the absolute desire for freedom.

‘We always think we know something about people, but then Shida Bazyar brilliantly shows us how much we still have to learn.’

‘Bazyar’s stories strike at the aching heart of exile. A pulsing longing for a better future lingers from its first page to its last. A quietly beautiful exploration of the trauma of losing one’s homeland to a savage regime, the novel is testament to how hope and the revolutionary spirit endure in the face of crushing tyranny, how courage cannot be fully stamped out. It lies dormant, awaiting a time when it can again ignite new acts of bravery, new waves of revolution.’

‘The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran fits the family novel mould in many ways: it spans generations, explores inherited trauma, and depicts the effects of politics on a family … This highly political and touching novel gives a great insight into the political situation in Iran … In translating this vision of authorial omnipotence — of an imagined freedom — Ruth Martin brings Shida Bazyar’s politically urgent and thematically significant voice to English-speaking readers … creating an experience that feels both immediate and compelling.’

‘So lively, so touching, and more relevant than ever. Read it!’

‘With a clear, sharp eye and plenty of space and feeling for contradictions, Bazyar draws a family portrait of people who have started a new life in a foreign country and are trying to keep something of the old.’

‘A fascinating look at the life of an immigrant family in Germany … Bazyar writes with a brilliant clarity … Special commendation goes to Ruth Martin for her translation.’

‘A quietly beautiful book … [With] themes so applicable to any of the decades which have gone before us, and they will be applicable to those yet to come.’

Praise for Sisters in Arms:

‘A smart, important novel that gives you a caress on the cheek and a punch in the jaw as you read it. The amazing thing is that in the end you want more of both.’

Praise for Sisters in Arms:

‘Shida Bazyar tells us — uncompromisingly, powerfully, and accusingly — what it means to have one’s origins constantly questioned.’

Praise for Sisters in Arms:

‘Humane, relatable, and self-aware, Sisters in Arms is an involving novel that indicts polite neoliberalism and open racism alike for the ways in which people in contemporary societies are forced apart.’

Shida Bazyar, born in 1988, studied writing in Hildesheim, and, in addition to writing, worked in youth education for many years. She is the author of The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran — which has won the Blogger Literary Award, Ulla Hahn Prize, and Uwe Johnson Prize, among others, and has been translated into Dutch, Farsi, French, and Turkish — and Sisters in Arms. Ruth Martin studied English literature before gaining a PhD in German. She has been translating fiction and nonfiction books since 2010, by authors ranging from Joseph Roth and Hannah Arendt to Volker Weidermann and Shida Bazyar. She has taught translation at the University of Kent and the Bristol Translates summer school, and is a former co-chair of the Society of Authors Translators Association.