Product Description

In the aftermath of the Iranian revolution, rare-gem dealer Isaac Amin is arrested, wrongly accused of being a spy. Terrified by his disappearance, his family must reconcile a new world of cruelty and chaos with the collapse of everything they have known. As Isaac navigates the terrors of prison, and his wife feverishly searches for him, his children struggle with the realization that their family may soon be forced to embark on a journey of incalculable danger.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3779 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-01
• Released on: 2008-04-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Sofer's family escaped from Iran in 1982 when she was 10, an experience that may explain the intense detail of this unnerving debut. On a September day in 1981, gem trader Isaac Amin is accosted by Revolutionary Guards at his Tehran office and imprisoned for no other crime than being Jewish in a country where Muslim fanaticism is growing daily. Being rich and having had slender ties to the Shah's regime magnify his peril. In anguish over what might be happening to his family, Isaac watches the brutal mutilation and executions of prisoners around him. His wife, Farnaz, struggles to keep from slipping into despair, while his young daughter, Shirin, steals files from the home of a playmate whose father is in charge of the prison that holds her father. Far away in Brooklyn, Isaac's nonreligious son, Parviz, struggles without his family's money and falls for the pious daughter of his Hasidic landlord. Nicely layered, the story shimmers with past secrets and hidden motivations. The dialogue, while stiff, allows the various characters to come through. Sofer's dramatization of just-post-revolutionary Iran captures its small tensions and larger brutalities, which play vividly upon a family that cannot, even if it wishes to, conform. (Aug.)
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From Bookmarks Magazine
Dalia Sofer, who was forced to flee postrevolutionary Iran at the age of ten after her own father was unjustly imprisoned, captures her family's experiences in this moving, semiautobiographical tale. Citing Sofer's evocative prose, sensitive characterizations, and suspenseful plot, reviewers called Sofer's debut novel persuasive and memorable. Though she ruminates on themes of faith, love, and the heavy toll of political and religious oppression, Sofer's honesty and balanced outlook prevent the story from lapsing into sensational melodrama or lurid allegory. Her descriptions of torture, though vivid, are not gratuitously violent. A few small complaints included some contrived dialogue and Parviz's annoying self-pity, but critics agreed that these do not detract from an otherwise "powerful, timely book" (Rocky Mountain News).

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
Sofer's enlightening debut opens with the 1981 arrest of Isaac Amin, a Jewish businessman in Iran accused of being a Zionist spy. His arrest was not unexpected. Isaac has seen neighbors and family members disappear and knows the remnants of the shah's entourage—businessmen and communist rebels alike—are seen as enemies by the Revolutionary Guards. Sofer illuminates the horrific details of Isaac's months in prison and deftly captures how that experience affects the rest of his family—his wife and daughter Shirin at home and son Parviz in New York, where he has quickly fallen from son of a wealthy man to starving shop boy. In the midst of their depressing circumstances, the author nestles small jewels of hope, like the delivery of leftovers by the wife of Parviz's landlord, or the repaired shoes, picked up weeks late by Shirin, waiting patiently for Isaac's feet to fill them once again. Sofer herself emigrated from postrevolutionary Iran to New York, and her debut resonates with the empathy derived from that journey. Donovan, Deborah

Customer Reviews

Couldn't connect with the characters
I feel like I was reading a different book than the rest of the reviewers. To me, the characters were all distant and hard to connect with, which made it hard for me to feel an investment in their evolutions or futures. The most compelling character and the story I was most interested in was the subplot about the daughter and the files. She was the only character that felt real to me. I would have liked to read more about her, but the rest of the family I could take or leave. Had I not been on a plane when reading it, I probably wouldn't have finished the book, and I finish everything.

Did I read the same book as everyone else?
After looking at the rave reviews for The Septembers of Shiraz, I chose it as my book club selection. Now I'm wondering what all the hype was about? While I find the subject matter compelling and heartbreaking, I found the writing and book to be neither. The characters lacked depth and were 2 dimensional at best, the ending was contrived and way too simplistic, and I felt as though I were hearing the story from someone who'd heard it second hand. When I finished the novel, I read "about the author," and it turns out I was right- I was hearing it third hand.
I had high hopes for this book, and I was very dissappointed.

Compelling and personal tale, but not very well-written
The Septembers of Shiraz is a 3 1/2 star book that I would have upgraded to 4 stars if immediately after finishing it I hadn't started reading Ariel Sabar's My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq. Both books are based on the personal stories of the authors' fathers, each of whom ended up emmigrating from the Middle East with his family as a result of religious and cultural persecution. This book is written as a novel, and Sabar's is non-fiction, but the greatest dissimilarity is in the quality of the writing. And that is where "The Septembers of Shiraz" comes up short.

This book, about an Iranian Jewish family during the cultural revolution which brought the Ayatollah Khomeini and his Islamic fundamentalists to power, is divided into the points of view of the four family members: Isaac Amin, a wealthy jeweler, his wife, Farnaz, their daughter Shirin, and their son, Parviz. Isaac is jailed on charges of being a Zionist and his wife and daughter must try to cope in a Tehran in which the lower classes have power for the first time in their lives. Parviz, in the weakest of the tales, is studying at university in New York and living with a family of Hasidic Jews.

You can tell on reading the book that the tale is deeply personal to the author and one which she researched rigorously, from the conditions in Iranian prisons to what life was like for ordinary people during the revolution. It's also one that needs to be told. If you know nothing about the Islamic revolution in Iran, the book is likely to be compelling. But chapters don't so much end as they just stop abruptly, sections are written in the wrong tense, and for these and other reasons I can't quite put my finger on, I found myself picking the book up and putting it down again a few pages later, whereas I read over half of Safar's book in one sitting.

Sofer can perhaps be forgiven some of the clunky writing in that English is not her first language. But then it isn't Khaled Hosseini's first language either, and both The Kite Runner and One Thousand Splendid Suns are gorgeously written. If you want to learn about what was lost in the cultural revolution in Iran and read just one book about it, even Reading Lolita in Tehran, which makes what was lost in the revolution more poignant still, would be a better choice. Sofer has made a good first effort and one which is worth reading, just with lower expectations that those which the other reviews here might give you. Perhaps I'm less moved by the book than I ought to be because while Sofer makes you feel the pain of the Amin family and what they have lost, she never really gives you a sense of greater context. But I just finished the book today and it's already starting to slip away in the face of a tale (Safar's) that is full of more detail, more history and that broader context and is, somehow, more moving.