Moon Brow

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The Guardian

One of Iran's greatest novelists

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David Mattin

The Guardian

Shahriar Mandanipour is one of the leading novelists of our time.... Mandanipour is one of Iran's most important living fiction writers, with a long track record and a formidable reputation in his own country. Since 2006 Mandanipour has been living in the USA ... where he moved to escape the censorship that was hampering publication of his work inside Iran.... One of Iran's greatest novelists is living and writing in the west, and readers of English are able at last to commune with his novelistic intelligence.

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James Wood

The New Yorker

Mandanipour's writing is exuberant, bonhomous, clever, profuse with puns and literary-political references; the reader unversed in contemporary Iranian fiction might easily think of Kundera... or of the Rushdie of Midnight's Children. ... Mandanipour is a charming and often witty guide.

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Maria Baghramian

The Irish Times

[Mandanipour's] works of fiction, densely metaphorical and replete with symbolisms drawn from the Persian literary tradition, reflect the extraordinary times he and his country have witnessed without being overtly political or tediously ideological. ... As a writer in exile he has a difficult journey ahead, not least of which is to decide on his intended audience. He has, I think, the potential to create a genre of Persian literature that could breach the gap in literary sensibilities that separates readers from vastly different traditions.

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Claire Messud

The New York Review of Books

While his fiction remained unpublished in Iran for much of the 1990s on account of censorship, he is one of that country's most celebrated and accomplished contemporary novelists.... Mandanipour expresses the complexity of his culture—not just of the society of the Islamic Republic, but of the underlying Persian traditions that continue to influence it.

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Andrew Kingsford-Smith

The Culture Trip

Both an essayist and a novelist, Shahriar Mandanipour has been dubbed one of the leading novelists of our time' by The Guardian. ... Mandanipour's writing style is widely loved by readers and critics alike because of his experiments with both language and context, and the way he beautifully weaves metaphoric images and symbols.

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Book Self 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.