Product Description

A passionate and timely debut about mothers and daughters, roots and exile, from the streets of Iran to the suburbs of London
In what is certain to be one of the most talked-about fiction debuts of the year, Yasmin Crowther paints a magnificent portrait of betrayal and retribution set against a backdrop of Iran’s tumultuous history, dramatic landscapes, and cultural beauty. The story begins on a blustery day in London, when Maryam Mazar’s dark secrets and troubled past surface violently with tragic consequences for her pregnant daughter, Sara. Burdened by guilt, Maryam leaves her comfortable English home for the remote village in Iran where she was raised and disowned by her father. When Sara decides to follow her she learns the price that her mother had to pay for her freedom and of the love she left behind.

Poetic, haunting, and brilliantly crafted, The Saffron Kitchen is sure to entrance fans of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #35922 in Books
• Published on: 2006-12-28
• Released on: 2006-12-28
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

Amazon.com
In The Saffron Kitchen, Yasmin Crowther has captured, with uncanny accuracy and grace, the deep confusion and conflict visited upon a mother and her daughter by their respective histories. The mother, Maryam, is an Iranian woman, daughter of a general and member of a well-respected family during the Shah's reign. When she became separated from her family at the start of the revolution and was sheltered chastely overnight by Ali, her father's servant, her life was forever changed. Disowned by her father, she moves to Tehran to become a nurse and then to London, where she meets and marries Edward, a fine and gentle man who adores her. When the story begins, their daughter, Sara, born in England, married to an Englishman, and ignorant of her mother's haunted history, is newly pregnant. When she miscarries, during a dramatic confrontation with her mother and her young Iranian cousin, years of secrets and pretending unravel at last.

Maryam decides to go to Iran, to distance herself from these events. What follows, in Crowther's revelatory manner, is a perfect portrayal of a half-life, one lived only on the surface. Maryam comes into her own when she goes back to her village; the sights, sounds, and smells all beckon to her with their sweet familiarity. England falls away, with all its confusing customs and strange language, as does Edward, with his so very different background. Beckoned by her mother, Sara comes to visit and to ferret out the particulars of her mother's past. The question remains: will Maryam return to Edward and England or stay where she is once again at home?

Crowther writes with great insight about attempting to cast off one's past--and the impossibility of doing so. The saffron kitchen of the title is a lovely evocation, both symbolic and actual, of what gets left behind and of one daughter's willingness to occupy both worlds. --Valerie Ryan

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Crowther's debut novel paints a vivid double portrait of a spirited mother-daughter pair, first- and second-generation immigrants to England from Iran whose relationship grows turbulent when shadows from the mother's past begin to overwhelm her. This beautifully produced reading starts with the bright voice of Ariana Fraval as Sara, the daughter, but it is soon overtaken by the darker, melodically accented tones of Mehr Mansuri as Maryam, Sara's mother. Maryam returns to the tiny village where she grew up to come to terms with her past, especially with the ghost of her father and with her first love, Ali, who has been waiting for her return. As Maryam journeys through Iran and back into her memories, and then induces Sara to come too, Mansuri's voice takes on myriad emotional shades, from wonder and delight to sharp regret and painful uncertainty. Intervals of Persian-inflected music helps set an exotic yet contemplative mood. Fraval and Mansuri's authentic pronunciation of the occasional foreign words allows listeners to be swept up by Crowther's lovely, haunting story even more easily than when reading it for themselves.
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From AudioFile
"When I humiliated my father, he humiliated me. It made me strong," Maryam tells her daughter in Crowther's first novel. The author and her daughter, who narrates half of this work, share an Iranian-British heritage. Together author and narrators lead listeners into a world difficult for a child to understand. Using dual narrators works well. Mehr Mansuri adopts a deep, flat tone for Maryam, who accepts whatever must happen next. In Ariana Fraval's voice we hear the excitement, fear, and confusion of a young person. This is a woman's story of living in a man's world--of breasts bound to keep a child young, of living with second and third wives, of pregnancy, and of violation. These might be strange customs from half-a-world away, but the voices are strangely familiar. R.R. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Customer Reviews

Touching Read
I loved this book almost from page one. The writing was spell binding and the characters were engaging and not at all predictable. But what I will say next is that by the end of the book I ended up not liking the main character, Maryam Mazar, even if I did sympathized with her on some level. I felt that she was selfish in her final decision and that she thought more about herself than about the people who loved her. Maryam Mazar is a woman who at the inception of the story is a sixty something lady. She lives in London now but her country of origin and birth is Iran. Through some circumstances, she is forced to leave home and settle in London where she meets a wonderful man and has a lovely daughter. In the beginning of the book, there is a tragedy that sends Maryam reeling and she seeks out her home in Iran, retreating from the misery that unfolds in London. I cannot delve much more into the particulars of what happens but here is where I found her decisions hard to stomach. She makes a choice that to me was very selfish and somewhat immature. Why would you leave behind all the love and care that your husband and daughter have showered you with for a life that you have not known for more than forty something years? By the time she goes back most of the people that were key actors in her life in Iran are dead and only a few important ones remain. She discards her present happiness for a past that she has somewhat eulogized in her mind and in my opinion was not totally deserving of its praises. I totally understand that because of the way in which she was forced to leave Iran, she never made peace with certain aspects of her life but I believe that we can make choices as to who we love and the importance that that love will hold in our lives. What happened to her was a travesty as she was punished for independence and being a young woman far ahead of her time, born in the wrong country for an out spoken woman. But as much as my heart hurt for her past pains, I could not reconcile her heartlessness in her decision making. Not since McEwan's Atonement have I been so angry with a character and I know that there were legions of people who wanted to give McEwan a piece of their mind for that ending. For me such endings (when well done) actually makes me applaud cause there are not many books that can get your so invested that you get so emotional at the end. A total recommend.

Beautiful...
If I were still in academia, I'd start a program in ex-pat Iranian literature. I'm totally intrigued with how the writers, including Crowther, manage to capture a world through sounds, smells, sights and texture, as opposed to a the way James and others catured the world through manners - the way a cane was held, a handkerchief dropped, etc. Kudos to this writer. It may be a bit of a "woman's" story, but the book is magical.

Painful read
For me personally, this book is written so badly that I could not finish it. The author tries too hard to sound elegant and it fails miserably.
I always try to finish books to give them a chance. This however I could not do with this paperback. Although it was the only book I made the mistake to take on a foreign vacation (could not buy other English reading material), I could not continue reading it. Too many metaphors that were useless and not only did not add, but took away from the story. You can not help but be so focused on the writting that you never get a chance to immerse yourself in the story.