FICTION - APRIL 2021
The Immortals of Tehran Ali Araghi
A sweeping multi-generational debut novel telling the story of a centuries-old curse carrying one family to the brink of the 1979 Iranian revolution now in paperback. ‘“How many stories have I told you?” Agha asked Ahmad who undid and redid his shirt collar button. “One hundred? Two? Three?” Ahmad did not answer. Agha placed the teapot on top of the samovar. “I have a big one for you today. It’s the best of my stories. It’s about cats.”’
‘Magnificent, brutal, spellbinding.’ Kathryn Davis, author of Duplex ‘Ali Araghi’s staggering debut is a book about time, about stories, about what time and stories can and cannot do to save us.’ Kaveh Akbar, author of Pilgrim Bell
As a child living in his family’s apple orchard, Ahmad Torkash-Vand treasures his great-great-great-great grandfather’s every mesmerizing word. On the day of his father’s death, Ahmad listens closely as the seemingly immortal elder tells him the tale of a centuries-old family curse... and the boy’s own fated role in the story. Ahmad grows up to suspect that something must be interfering with his family, as he struggles to hold them together through decades of famine, loss, and political turmoil in Iran. Exploring the brutality of history while conjuring the astonishment of magical realism, The Immortals of Tehran is a novel about the incantatory power of words and the revolutionary sparks of love, family, and poetry—set against the indifferent, relentless march of time.
An amazing literary debut.’ Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, author of When Skateboards Will Be Free 15th April 2021 - 9781612199078- £12.99 - 400pp - Trade PB Fiction - Territory: WORLD - Ebook 9781612198194 Ali Araghi is an Iranian writer and translator. He won the 2017 Prairie Schooner Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing and has published stories and translations in Prairie Schooner, The Fifth Wednesday Journal, Asymptote, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among others. He lives in St. Louis, Missouri.
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