The Persian Bride: A Novel - Softcover

Buchan, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0618219234 ISBN 13: 9780618219230

Publisher: Mariner Books, 2002

Synopsis

At once a great love story, a riveting political thriller, and a profound analysis of modern Iran, THE PERSIAN BRIDE is unflinching in its vision of twentieth-century chaos. In 1974, the young Englishman John Pitt follows the hippie trail to Isfahan, where he encounters the enchanting Shirin Farameh. These two young people fall desperately in love and marry, despite their cultural differences and the political upheaval surrounding them. When they are tragically separated, John sets off in search of his wife on a nightmare journey that takes him from the corrupt court of the shah to the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.

About this title

Review

Luminous, exotic, terrifying, and brutal, The Persian Bride is a complex and worldly revelation, a story that, like the river that runs through the city of Isfahan, "carries on its surface traces of an earlier existence, and may indeed exist to submerge them, like the plane leaves it carries down in autumn or the pieces of its burst spring dwelling." In 1974, 18-year-old John Pitt arrives in Iran. By turns violent and introspective, James Buchan's narrator is "a mere instrument of change in a situation made brittle by violence, treachery and the veil." The chador is in Islamic society a barrier both physical and literal, shielding women from the transgressive male gaze. When John crosses that barrier by falling desperately in love with and marrying Shirin Farameh, the daughter of a general in the Iranian air force, all the forces of history descend upon him.

In his sixth novel, Buchan coaxes forth shadows--political, personal, spiritual--to engulf both narrator and reader. Past and present, reality and illusion, form the warp and weft of a story as intricately woven as the Persian rugs on which Shirin treads (an obvious, but accurate, metaphor). Buchan was a foreign correspondent for 10 years, so it isn't surprising that he should offer so solid a portrait of a world on the brink. What is surprising, and infinitely rewarding, is the bittersweet poignancy with which he brings that world to brilliant and supple life. --Kelly Flynn

About the Author

James Buchan studied Persian and Arabic in Iran in the 1970's and was for ten years a foreign correspondent for the London Financial Times. His novels have won major literary prizes in Britain, including the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize, and have been translated into eight languages. He lives with his wife and three children on a farm in Norfolk, England.

About this edition

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0618219234
• ISBN 13: 9780618219230
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352