THE HOUSE ON SUN STREET

A girl experiences the Iranian Revolution, creeping repression, and war in Ghazirad’s novel.

The author focuses her story on Moji, a 6-year-old girl living in Tehran in 1978; her idyllic existence centers around her grandparents’ Sun Street house, where her grandmother, Azra, cooks succulent meals and her grandfather, Agha Joon, gardens and reads her and her little sister, Mar Mar, tales from One Thousand and One Nights. Life is upended when the shah is overthrown and Ayatollah Khomeini establishes the Islamic Republic of Iran. Moji’s father, an army officer who supported the shah, takes his wife and the children to America, where Baba, Maman, and the children endure anti-Iranian prejudice when members of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran are taken hostage. They return home after two years to find Iran profoundly changed: Many books and ideologies are now banned, and the struggle to keep every wisp of hair hidden beneath a headscarf becomes a preoccupation for Moji. Ensconced in her girls’ school, Moji chafes at Islamic puritanism. She swipes volumes from a hidden cache of banned books and develops a crush on a female teacher, which prompts erotic impulses condemned as sinful in Khomeini’s book of Islamic sex advice. Ghazirad’s novel is a lyrical evocation of Iranian life, full of limpid detail: “Azra emptied the water that had dribbled in the bowl underneath the globe-shaped samovar and blew the blue flame inside its chimney through the gridded opening. White smoke funneled up the samovar’s chimney and vanished in the air.” The prose develops a searing emotional charge as Moji registers the disasters engulfing Iran. “Uncle Zabih trembled as he called Amir’s name over and over again,” she observes at a funeral for a teenaged cousin killed in battle. “Tears glistened on his cheeks in the sunshine. Maybe he hoped his son could hear and respond. But Amir was dead silent among the moaning women and stunned men staring at the fast-filling grave.” The result is a heartbreaking coming-of-age novel, luminous but tinged with darkness.

An absorbing, quietly intense saga of upheaval and war as seen through the eyes of a child.