Kader Abdolah

It is Iran in 1969. In the house of the mosque, the family of Aqa Jaan has lived for eight centuries. Now it is occupied by three cousins—Aqa Jaan, a merchant and head of the city’s bazaar; Alsaberi, the imam of the mosque; and Aqa Shoja, the mosque’s muezzin. The house teems with life as each family grows up with …

On a holy mountain in the depths of Persia there is a cave with a mysterious cuneiform carving deep inside it. Aga Akbar, a deaf-mute boy from the mountain, develops his own private script from these symbols and writes passionately of his life, his family and his efforts to make sense of the changes the twentieth …