I'm fascinated by Iran. They have this amazing history of the Persian Empire. They were a modern country, unlike their Arab neighbors, until the revolution of 1979. Then overnight they became a backward totalitarian religious regime. I love dystopian novels, and this is like one playing out in real life and it's terrifying. This novel takes place within the last few years, and shows the absurdity of the country today. It's a thriller, but it's a thriller because of the insane hoops you have to jump through in modern day Iran. The main character is fairly Americanized, having gone to college here and working at an American university. He returns to Iran and is in many ways unfamiliar with the ways of the country and gets caught up in craziness in trying to help his friend and his mother. I appreciated seeing the other side of a war America is involved in, how much trouble we cause. There is also an American military man who comes to regret America's role in Iraq. The author is also an Iranian who was educated in and works in America. It made everything feel real, even the craziest parts of the story.

Could have been amazingly immersive but it fell short. The story being told felt like it was missing some crucial detail to make the reader truly empathize with Rez's experience. On one hand, I appreciate an author assuming the reader is intelligent. Leaving some details unsaid as opposed to spelling out everything shows trust in the reader's comprehension. For me though, especially when dealing with a culture and country I am not as familiar with, some things need to be spelled out to truly grasp the emotion. For example, I can assume that the political climate in Tehran was tense and that dealings such as property exchange when a lot of money is involved could be dangerous and even deadly. That's as far as it goes though, and I felt the novel rushed through some of the scenarios that could have been discussed a bit more thoroughly for the reader to connect with the protagonist.

This book was boring for me. A lot of the beginning was written in dialogue, so when I didn't quite understand something, I didn't get much context to help me out. Maybe a stronger knowledge of the events in the Middle East around 2008 would have made this book more interesting.

This is a tough book to write about because it's kind of packaged as a thriller, but it isn't really one -- or rather, isn't a thriller in the sense most people think of the genre. It's a lot more quiet, subtle, and meditative than that -- it's really more about exile, friendship, family, and showing how life in Iran really works. The story revolves around Reza, an Iranian-American whose moved to California as a teen after the 1979 revolution, went to Berkeley and got a PhD, then worked as a translator throughout the Middle East, and is now a middle-aged journalism professor on year-to-year contracts at a Fordham-like school in New York City. When his closest friend from Berkeley asks him to come to Tehran, he gets embroiled in a convoluted scheme involving the friend's potentially vast inheritance of property seized during the revolution. Meanwhile, Reza becomes friends with a former US Marine officer who joins the faculty at his school, and also gets tangled up in the plans of an ambitious American journalist he used to translate for.

The inheritance is more or less a MacGuffin to draw Reza to Tehran and give the characters some stakes. But the story's real aim is to show the reader just how much of what happens in Iran, and the Middle East in general, is about money and power, rather than religion and beliefs. Every conversation Reza has is a veiled negotiation, and behind every player are untold layers of other players, and within every scheme are three others. Where a conventional thriller would have the hero discover all this in wide-eyed shock and suspense along the way, the strength of this book is that Reza knows all this and recognizes that he can only play the game within certain margins and only push so far before things get very dangerous. This all happens among an array of colorful characters -- from a semi-official minder/fixer who may or may not be working for the Iranian government and/or intelligence, to functionary thugs, a mysterious Afghan crime boss, and even the jetsetting, yoga-loving, elite of the city.

Meanwhile, Reza is constantly recalibrating his relationship with the old friend who dragged him into all this. The friend may or may not be involved in some kind of murky quasi-terrorist group operating in Iraq, and may or may not have found religion along the way. Readers who need everything clearcut are advised to stay away, since the whole point of the book is that notions of set ideology, allegiance, or belief are laughably naive in Tehran. In contrast to this is Reza's ex-Marine friend, who is a real American hero who grew disenchanted with the war and dropped out. Although his internal code of honor is naive to Reza, it is also the one true good thing he can point to as cause for hope.

Along with the aforementioned plot lines, there is another involving Reza's long-lost mother, and an entirely separate strand involving her dying neighbor, who came to Tehran as a Polish refugee during World War II. This latter element is well handled, and yet feels largely shoehorned in to share the remarkable story of how 115,000 Polish refugees came from the USSR to Iran during World War II. So, there's a lot going on in a relatively few pages -- and at times it can get a little busy and distracting. Still, this is an excellent and thoughtful book that will do more to give a reader a sense and feel for contemporary Iran than any number of long articles in the Times or Economist.