Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

This book is a slow paced book with very little plot. The character development is very well done and if you are a fan of character studies you will like this book.
Good for fans of family sagas

Beautiful writing that breaks your heart but leaves you full of hope. I'll definitely be seeking out more work by this author.

If you are into sweeping epics that portray interconnected lives against the backdrop of seismic political and social upheaval then Aris is most definitely the book for you. After finishing this I can say I am not surprised the great Margaret Atwood has been comparing this new novel to Dr Zhivago; that’s a great comparison.

Aria is an orphan, abandoned late at night (not long after her birth) in the middle of 1950s Tehran by her impoverished mother. But though she was abandoned to die, a young man finds the baby and takes her home with him. And, so, Aria starts to survive and thrive during tumultuous times.

The corruption of the Shah is at an all-time high and the spread of a dangerous fundamentalist form of Sharia is on the rise and sights of veils start becoming more frequent: “Why hide the face, the teller of tales and secrets? But maybe that was it, he thought: Women’s stories and secrets were dangerous.”

This is of little interest to the young Aria whose path through life sees her rise from the slums and poverty in the south of the city to mixing it with the rich in the northern suburbs. We bear witness to Aria’s friendships and rivalries, and to the characters she meets, as she matures from a fiery young girl into a confused, often guilt-ridden woman with responsibilities and many questions unanswered; a life that crosses so many lines and touches many lives.

“I’ll name you Aria, after all the world’s pains and all the world’s loves,” he said. “It will be as if you had never been abandoned. And when you open your mouth to speak, all the world will know you.”

This book is over 400 pages long and, like all epics, is best delivered slowly, like a flower unfurling, allowing all the paths chosen by the characters we meet to be allowed to unfold as they should, for all they plans to pan out as they must. And Nazanine achieves that gentle pacing beautifully. If you’re after a rip-roaring page-turner, this is not for you; rather this is a gentle, atmospheric wander through the roads of Tehran over a period of 25 years that ends with a dramatic finale as Khomeini’s plane touches down in Iran and all the lives Aria touched tangle in the most terrible of ways.

A brutal but necessary end to a most beautiful book.

I must confess to not being hugely knowledgable about Iran’s history so I was intrigued to read this book. It is a story full of both beauty and pain that is fantastically written and completely engrossing. I’d definitely recommend.

Thanks to NetGalley and to the publisher for this ARC.

I have been fascinated with the history of Iran, particularly during the Islamic Revolution period, since reading Reading Lolita in Tehran a number of years ago. This book isn't as well written as that, but as a broad spectrum approach to the context and motivations for the revolution, it works well. Following Aria through the years leading up to 1979 allows us to see both sides of the conflict, from working class discontent to middle and upper class wealth.

This is also a book about family and figuring out where you belong, which is obviously a universal theme. Aria is a well developed character but I would have liked a little more fleshing out of those around her. However, I still really liked this book.

Set in Iran between 1953 and 1981, this novel follows Aria, from being abandoned as a baby girl in the streets of Tehran to her becoming a parent herself. It is a tale of "a mother who left her, a mother who beat her and a mother who loved her but couldn't say so".
The backdrop is the gradual disillusion in the ruling of the country by the Shah and British intervention to the bloody revolution triggering the strict religious beliefs of Khomeini.
I found the historical aspect very interesting and it helped plug gaps in my knowledge and understanding of changes in Islamic society.
The characters were well drawn and rounded. There are horrors here, and sadly, as it is not unusual in repressive regimes and times of revolution, the shootings and hangings I found less disturbing than the systemic child beating and the description of an eye infection!
There is a misguided hope expressed at the end that the characters are doing what they think is right at the time: as the letter that Aria reads at the end shows, nobody can foresee what an action may lead to and the fallout from doing a good deed can bring tragedy to others.

Hozar manages to be enlightening on the huge changes in a country and its history whilst focussing on a personal story and the community around them.

Thank you to Netgalley and Penguin Books UK for this advanced reader's copy. Well written book and a heart wrenching story. A definite eye opener.

Well written, good characters. Emotional and heartbreaking.
This book will make you think and it’s certainly an eye opener .
Thank you to both NetGalley and Penguin Books for giving me the opportunity to read this book and review it

As an Anglo Iranian with a blue eyed niece called Aria,I simply knew I had to read this book when it popped into my inbox. It didn't disappoint. It was fascinating, eye opening, and, at times, deeply moving. I really enjoyed it and it gave me a deep yearning to visit Iran, a place steeped in rich culture and historical importance. I also want to taste the wonderful food.
I knocked off one star for the eBook formatting which made it hard to read. There were words missed out so you wouldn't realise a scene had changed, bouncing between characters and incomplete words (missing f's) so I had to sometimes guess what the word should be.

what a heartbreaking book that make me feel like I was reading an Elif Shafak novel. This book is certainly work the heartrending story; I think we can all learn something from Aria.

This story is set in Tehran. At the age of 3 days, Aria who is not yet named is abandoned by her mother. She becomes ‘a throwaway girl from the street’.

Behrouz, a driver in the army, has married Zahra an older woman. Together they inhabit an apartment in a poor area: ‘rough concrete floor, cold and uninviting, uncovered by wood or carpet’ and the ‘smell of dung and dirt and poverty’

It is Behrouz that first finds the baby and takes the little girl home
but his wife, Zahra, doesn’t want baby in house – she thinks it’s his from another woman.

The early parts of this book has a cinderella style feel to it. Zahra is the ‘stepmother’ character who beats poor little Aria until she bleeds and traps her out of the house on a balcony. When she is inside,

‘most of her time was spent washing clothes’

Other characters appear and disappear. A Young Captain in the army called Rameen who teaches Mehrouz how to read amongst other things. But the Shah takes a dislike to Rameen who ends up tortured and in prison. Then there is Kamran, Aria’s neighbour who tries to help her and who later becomes involved in the movement to depose the Shah.

Too much seems disparate and only partially relevant. Not a Cinderella story at all, because this is Tehran and it is the time of the Shah and before the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini. But I found myself longing to some cohesive sort of thread. Everytime Aria appeared I thought, this is your story. Make it happen.

Aria contracts trachoma due to Zahra’s neglect and ill treatment of her and risks losing her sight.
By a series of coincidences the girl is taken to the house of a woman called Fereshteh, a Zorastrian, where her stepmother Zahra was once a maid, and where she is taken in to be educated and lead a less fearful poverty stricken life that she has hitherto lived.

In one unexplicable passage - when she is a little older and has been to school and learned to read - Aria is asked to help out a family known as Shirazi. Aria has no idea why she is asked to do this and it is only fair to say the reader has no idea either. Some of the family members of the Shirazi family are hostile to her, including one of the sisters she is asked to teach.

This teaching of the Shirazi family, which Aria loathes, is done at Fereshti’s insistence as she is eventually told, she has to learn to help others less fortunate than she has been. So far so good. But inexplicably, when the woman learns from Aria that the Shirazi family is Jewish she asks her to stop going even though it seemed that she must have known that the family were Jewish. Aria does not stop visiting them.

The book is set against a background of cultural and national and religious complexities that I didn’t always understand. That’s fine I’m happy not to always understand things as long as I am enlightened somewhere along the way. There is no real access to the internal life of any of the characters of their motivations, their wishes or dreams or beliefs I was as ignorant at the end as at the beginning.

Aria grows, her father dies. His old friend Rameen finally released from whatever hell hole he has been imprisoned in, tries to find the family. He reappears in Zahra’s life with some letters and money which he believes are from Aria’s father but she tells him Behrouz was already dead when they were written that the letters are from Zahra. There is money but she does not want it.

Only at the end of the book Aria after marries an American, a non-muslim and gives birth to a child herself the narrative finally seems to take some kind of shape. There is a movement to depose the Shah and instate Ayatollah Khomeini as leader which causes much fighting and bloodshed in which Aria gets mixed up. The rise of Hezbollah. The Revolutionary Guard with Kalashnikovs strapped over their shoulders.’ The forced wearing of the hijab.

There is just the hollow promises of Khomeini at the end: “Women would never be mistreated again, for the purity of Islam and the veil would save them” There would never again in this country be a poor person. Starvation would be a distant memory.”

This book was an opportunity to inform and educate as well as entertain. It is an opportunity which has been largely missed.

This is a fantastic book. Epic, wonderfully written, moving, exciting, clever and funny.

But this is the worst review copy I have ever read.

Given that the US edition of this book is already published, offering a decent draft shouldn't be beyond the wit of man. However the version on offer here is appalling. The combination of letters 'ff' 'fi' and 'fl' are replaced by spaces. The first line of every new section is missing. There are random words thrown in across the text.

i persevered because the book was so good. Its not the authors fault that this is a terrible copy. I've given her five stars. But please sort this arc out.

Im in two minds about this book. One one hand, it was an insightful read into the IRan of the 1950s but the main character of Aria was hard to follow at times and her story was drawn out for me. However the bigger picture was an interesting tapestry of Iranian culture and political upheaval.
The 1950's were an interesting time as these were the days of the Iranian revolution that replaced the Shah with the Ayatollah Khomeini. The story is told through the eyes of an orphan girl, Aria. This is also her story and we see how she copes with the changing political situation at such a young age.

Aria's story is sad - abandoned and then taken home by a driver whose wife is awful! There is some happiness and nice people in her life but the troubles seem insurmountable. The book is split into four parts, each based on the four mother roles in the book and I found this worked well to get more viewpoints but also made the book seem disjointed at times and overly long.

There is a lot of detail about the revolution but ti does seem to be a realistic depiction of the political unrest, violence, tragedy and all out instability. There are some very graphic descriptions and heartbreaking scenes throughout.

A heartbreaking read but an eye opener all the same

This novel is different from my normal genre and I must admit that I found it a tough read. It is in essence a beautiful story of love and salvation bringing out the best and worst of mankind's traits and reactions to life. However there is a brutal and gritty side of writing within which I found hard to get past. Reality for various parts of the world, I am sure but difficult to read about and then get to sleep at night. Give the book a go as long as you are aware of the violence and brutality of life contained within.