My Father’s Notebook
- 4 Nov 2021
- 9781786898982
- £9.99
- 336 pp
- 129×198mm
- 4 Jun 2009
- 9781847676337
- £7.99
- 336 pp
In a few words
A father-son tale set amid the tumultous history of twentieth-century Iran, written by a masterful Iranian novelist in exile
In a few words
A father-son tale set amid the tumultous history of twentieth-century Iran, written by a masterful Iranian novelist in exile
This poignant, affectionate and beautifully told tale reflects a longing for a lost homeland
Beautifully evoked in often touching and amusing detail . . . My Father's Notebook is an intriguing, complex and often playful novel that deserves attention
beautifully evoked in often touching and amusing detail My Father's Notebook is an intriguing, complex and often playful novel that deserves attention
With seamlessly interwoven quotations from Persian and Dutch literature, deft storytelling and affectionate humour, he offers the reader buoyancy as well as weight My Father's Notebook is a gift to English readers
More about
the book
When he was a boy, Aga Akbar, the illegitimate, deaf son of a Persian nobleman, travelled with his uncle to a cave on nearby Saffron Mountain. Once there, he was to transcribe a cuneiform inscription over three thousand years old. Decades later, his son, Ishmael – a political dissident in exile – attempts to translate a notebook filled with a private language made from this ancient script . . . and in the process tells his father’s story, his own, and the story of twentieth-century Iran.
My Father’s Notebook is at once a masterful chronicle of a culture’s troubled voyage into modernity and the heart-rending, timeless tale of a son’s enduring love.
More about
the book
When he was a boy, Aga Akbar, the illegitimate, deaf son of a Persian nobleman, travelled with his uncle to a cave on nearby Saffron Mountain. Once there, he was to transcribe a cuneiform inscription over three thousand years old. Decades later, his son, Ishmael – a political dissident in exile – attempts to translate a notebook filled with a private language made from this ancient script . . . and in the process tells his father’s story, his own, and the story of twentieth-century Iran.
My Father’s Notebook is at once a masterful chronicle of a culture’s troubled voyage into modernity and the heart-rending, timeless tale of a son’s enduring love.
My Father's Notebook, a lovely novel, has the cadence of a fairy tale and the clarity of truth
A storyteller of utmost subtlety and natural ease
With seamlessly interwoven quotations from Persian and Dutch literature, deft storytelling and affectionate humour, he offers the reader buoyancy as well as weight. My Father's Notebook is a gift to English readers
[A] powerful meditation . . . A moving elegy for a lost father and homeland, but also a voice raised against all forms of repression . . . My Father's Notebook reads like a detective story
A moving elegy for a lost father and homeland, but also a voice raised against all forms of repression... My Father's Notebook reads like a detective story: information is withheld so that we gradually discover the background to Ishmael's exile.
