Moon Brow
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
From “one of Iran's most important living fiction writers” (The Guardian) comes a fantastically imaginative story of love and war narrated by two angel scribes perched on the shoulders of a shell-shocked Iranian soldier who’s searching for the mysterious woman haunting his dreams.
Before he enlisted as a soldier in the Iran–Iraq War and disappeared, Amir Yamini was a carefree playboy whose only concerns were seducing women and riling his religious family. Five years later, his mother and sister Reyhaneh find him in a mental hospital for shell-shocked soldiers, his left arm and most of his memory lost. Amir is haunted by the vision of a mysterious woman whose face he cannot see—the crescent moon on her forehead shines too brightly. He names her Moon Brow.
Back home in Tehran, the prodigal son is both hailed as a living martyr to the cause of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Revolution and confined as a dangerous madman. His sense of humor, if not his sanity, intact, Amir cajoles Reyhaneh into helping him escape the garden walls to search for Moon Brow. Piecing together the puzzle of his past, Amir decides there’s only one solution: he must return to the battlefield and find the remains of his severed arm—and discover its secret.
All the while, two angels sit on our hero’s shoulders and inscribe the story in enthrallingly distinctive prose. Wildly inventive and radically empathetic, steeped in Persian folklore and contemporary Middle East history, Moon Brow is the great Iranian novelist Shahriar Mandanipour’s unforgettable epic of love, war, morality, faith, and family.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this beautiful and ambitious novel, Mandanipour (Censoring an Iranian Love Story) tells the story of Amir Yamini, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq War who lost his left arm and much of his memory in battle. By day, Amir is confined to his family's mansion in Tehran, left to aimlessly wander the gardens under the eye of his father's guards. But by night, Amir is visited in his dreams by a woman he knows as Moon Brow, his true love, whose identity he cannot recall. With the help of his skeptical sister, Reyhaneh, Amir begins tracking down the loose ends of his life before the war in a desperate attempt to find Moon Brow. Amir's quest takes him from Tehran to the ravaged mountains of western Iran. There, his lost arm and the wedding ring it may have held could be the key to learning Moon Brow's identity. Set in Iran before and after the revolution, Mandanipour's novel is by turns comic and tragic, both a fantastic love story and a searing portrait of a nation caught between its past and future. Mandanipour's story is imaginative and captivating.
