Iran’s Poet of Female Desire, Forough Farrokhzad, is celebrated in a novel by Maryam Diener

posted 2/3/2020

Beyond Black There Is No Color: The Story of Forough Farrokhzad is written in the first person, as if narrated by Forough herself, in a loose diary style. It depicts real-life episodes in Forough’s life: her marriage as a teenager to a much older man, her early experience of motherhood and divorce, her affair with the married film director Ebrahim Golestan, and her 12-day stay in a leper colony, which became the subject of her award-winning documentary.

For those unfamiliar with the poet, the book is an introduction to her life and legacy. For those who know her well, it is a reminder of the powerful voice that she was and is . . .

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Only the Dead: A Levantine Tragedy by T. J. Gorton

PB • 216x138mm (with flaps) • £12 • Fiction (F) • 9780704374607 • £14 • Quartet Books

Only the Dead: A Levantine Tragedy is also, by chance, the creation of an American with long experience of the language, life and literature of the Middle East.

Ted Gorton has created a fictional memoir of a Lebanese entrepreneur who looks back over the stirring events of the past decades from the shelter of his poetry library in a villa overlooking bombed-out Beirut.

What makes it exceptional is the fusion of portraits of real people with impeccably researched historical detail.

I found myself immersed in a fast-paced narrative packed full of adventures on the battlefield and in the bedroom and spliced with espionage, revenge, betrayal and war—and I could not put it down.

Barnaby Rogerson