My Father's Notebook: A Masterful Literary Novel of Enduring Love and Cuneiform Secrets

When he was a boy, Aga Akbar, the deaf-mute illegitimate son of a Persian nobleman, traveled with his uncle to a cave on nearby Saffron Mountain. Once there, he was to copy a three-thousand-year-old cuneiform inscription—an order of the first king of Persia—as a means of freeing himself from his emotional confinement. For the remainder of his life, Aga Akbar used these cuneiform characters to fill a notebook with writings only he could understand. Years later, his son, Ishmael—a political dissident in exile—is attempting to translate the notebook . . . and in the process tells his father's story, his own, and the story of twentieth-century Iran.

A stunning and ambitious novel by a singular literary talent, My Father's Notebook is at once a masterful chronicle of a culture's troubled voyage into modernity and the poignant, timeless tale of a son's enduring love.

Kader Abdolah is a pen name created to honor friends who died under the oppressive Iranian regime. The author of three novels, two short story collections, and numerous works of nonfiction, Abdolah joined a secret leftist organization while a student in Teheran. In 1988, at the invitation of the United Nations, he came to the Netherlands as a political refugee.