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 tedium and terrors of prison, forging tenuous trusts, his wife feverishly searches for him, suspecting, all the while, that their once-trusted housekeeper has turned on them and is now acting as an informer. And as his daughter, in a childlike attempt to stop the wave of baseless arrests, engages in illicit activities, his son, sent to New York before the rise of the Ayatollahs, struggles to find happiness even as he realizes that his family may soon be forced to embark on a journey of incalculable danger.

A page-turning literary debut, The Septembers of Shiraz simmers with questions of identity, alienation, and love, not simply for a spouse or a child, but for all the intangible sights and smells of the place we call home.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #48150 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-01
• Released on: 2007-07-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 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

A great, poignant story
The story of a jewish man and his family caught in the aftermath of the "departure" of the Shah of Iran in the 1980's. This is the kind of book you can't let go of and you need to keep reading. You feel for the characters as the chapters unfold.

I enjoyed Dalia Sofer's debut; try 'In the Country of Men' next
I enjoyed Dalia Sofer's debut novel, though I'm having a bit of a difficult time aligning my reading experience with the notable NYT book review where they comment "it's impossible to predict whether Sofer's novel will become a classic, but it certainly stands a chance." That's quite a statement.

The tale is loosely based on Ms. Sofer's own experiences of a Jewish Persian upbringing. That Ms. Sofer's own father, Simon, was also imprisoned in the early days of the Islamic Republic of Iran surely brings added resonance to the novel. It's not hard to see Dalia Sofer as Shirin, daughter of the book's protagonist, Issac Amin. Her work 'lifts the veil' (as reviewers have deftly said about it) on what things were like in Iran circa 1979 - 1982. [Sofer and her family fled Iran when she was 10. She was born in 1972.]

A similar work to try out is Hisham Matar's excellent In the Country of Men. Replace Iran with Libya, but the idea's the same: a quasi-autobiographical work by a talented debut novelist who, as a child, watched a beloved father be snatched up and imprisoned by the new regime.

The Septembers of Shiraz
Moving and poetic first novel that carries the reader back to Iran in the days after the overthrow of the Shah and the terror that claimed those who benefited from his largesse. Each character was brought to life as layers were pulled away revealing heroic but very human and and fallible individuals. Althought this was from the perspective of a Jewish Family the author did try to represent the disparity between the classes while under the rule of the Shah. Greed and gluttony is acknowledged and even those that benefit from his largesse are uncomfortable with the excessiveness of his rule. I found myself intrigued by the history and swept away with each character and their internal conflicts how to move forward and leave their home. The author does a fine job of introducing a main plot with several subpots rotating around the center of this family crisis. Greed, betrayal, love, and loyalty give dimension to a unique story of a family in crisis. I would have liked to see the plight of the brother woven into the family a little more carefully. Excellent work I highly recommend to anyone.