The Walking

Laleh Khadivi

Bloomsbury Publishing

271 pages, Rs 399

Iran, 1979. The mullahs have come to power and they want everyone to know. Two young Kurdish brothers, Saladin and Ali, are forced to swear their loyalty to the new regime by taking part in a massacre. In the traumatic aftermath of the killing, they flee over the treacherous Zagros mountains, on foot to Istanbul and onward by freighter to the Azores, where, after a painful parting, Saladin continues alone on a cargo plane to Los Angeles. In this second novel of her trilogy about Iran, Khadivi tells the story of exodus from the homeland, an experience that hundreds of thousands of Iranians have undergone.