How would you summarise this book in a sentence to encourage readers to pick it up?
Timely and tender, political and wonderfully human, The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran follows an Iranian family from revolution into exile, exploring the yearnings of different generations, and a dream of ‘azadi’, freedom, that never dies.
Is there something unique about this book, something that you haven’t encountered in fiction before?
Readers will love the way Bazyar allows every generation their breathing space, capturing confusions, restlessness and the search for home beautifully. The structure she’s found is striking: we return to Behzad and Nahid’s family every 10 years, from 1979 to 2009, living with them through crushed revolutions and resuscitated dreams. Alongside, we follow Iran through cycles of brutality, trauma, resurgence and renewal.
What do you think it is about this book that readers will not only admire, but really love?
The voices! In just 266 pages, we feel as though we know each generation so well. The young revolutionaries come into maturity far away from home, with their freight of guilt for those they’ve left behind in Iranian jails. Their children grow up with less nostalgia, immense curiosity about a homeland that is not home, and about what it means to fight for revolution.
Can you tell us about any particular characters that readers might connect with, and why?
Behzad broke our hearts; he reminds us of so many friends who hurled themselves into the fight against authoritarianism with glad zeal. Often, their idealism was shattered by a cruel system. But we also loved his wife and fellow revolutionary Nahid, who holds on to her intelligence and clarity, feeling her way through an alien Germany, through the loneliness that comes with the ‘frozen state’ of exile.
Although it’s a work of fiction, is there anything about it that’s especially relevant to issues we’re confronting in today’s world?
Iran is not just a headline. As the country grapples with a war it did not choose, as its people are plunged into further chaos, The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran is a powerful reminder of the complex and multi-layered history of Iran and many other places damaged by the return of imperialism. Bazyar’s characters, down to the youngest child, Tara, who narrates the epilogue, never feel like stereotypes but individuals caught up in the swirl of history, just like everyone living through today’s turbulent geopolitics.
Is there one specific moment in the book that has stuck in your mind and, if so, why?
We were struck by a tiny section, where Laleh goes to a kafishop in Tehran – ‘I’m constantly being taken to places where I can’t figure out who people are’ – sitting on wobbly chairs to drink juices and milkshakes, and where her relatively calm life as a teenager in Germany collides with the talk of her childhood friends, who grew up with demonstrations and disappearances, negotiating the regime with practiced subterfuges.
The ‘nice, laughing’ people Laleh meets in Iran suddenly seem like characters in ‘a huge, horrific soap opera’. Bazyar’s greatest gift is her ability to shine a light onto the hidden lives of countries, until we inhabit their most private dreams and nightmares.
