Persians

Spanning decades and continents, this debut follows five women of the Valiat family, once among Iran's most illustrious names, as they navigate the gap between who they were and who they have become. In Iran before the revolution they were somebodies; in America, many of them are nobodies. The fragile balance of family power tips during a 2005 vacation in Aspen, a year after Seema's death from cancer, when the flamboyant Shirin is arrested and charged with attempted prostitution, a scandal that draws the whole clan into its orbit. Across alternating voices, the novel moves among the matriarch Elizabeth, who stayed behind in Tehran; her daughters Shirin and Seema, who left for America in 1979; and the granddaughters Niaz and Bita, caught between inherited grandeur and uncertain futures. Their stories braid revolution and exile with private rebellions, ambition, shame, and love. By turns sharp and tender, the book examines class, displacement, and the stories families tell to preserve their own myths, and what it costs to keep performing a greatness that has slipped away. The result is a multigenerational portrait of women refusing, each in her own way, to disappear.