Les putes voilées n'iront jamais au paradis!

Les putes voilées n'iront jamais au paradis ! (Veiled Whores Will Never Enter Paradise) is a searing novel by the Iranian-French writer Chahdortt Djavann, a fierce indictment of the treatment of women under Iran's theocratic regime.

The book braids together two strands. One follows the parallel destinies of two extraordinarily beautiful girls, Zahra and Soudeba, separated at the age of twelve and each ground down by a society ruled by men. The other gathers the voices, from beyond the grave, of prostitutes murdered, hanged, and stoned in Iran — women found strangled with their own headscarves, dismissed by their neighbors as deserving their fate.

By turns crude, blackly funny, and devastating, these authentic voices confront the reader with the machinery of religious repression and its hatred of the female body and of pleasure. Unflinching and politically charged, the novel is a raw, essential work about oppression, survival, and the price of speaking the truth.