‘The majority of Iranians want democracy’

Your novel spans four generations of an Iranian family from the 1979 revolution to present-day Germany.

- Arunima Mazumdar

What drew you to tell this multigenerational story?Above all, I wanted to learn more about this topic myself. My parents were politically persecuted, first by the Shah and then by the Islamic regime, which is why they had to flee Iran a year before I was born. But that was all I knew.

The details of how they became politicised, when they realised they had to flee and what their fears and hopes were, were not part of our family stories. So I used my work on the novel as an opportunity to interview my parents and ask all the questions you don't normally ask in a family. These interviews, along with my further research, formed the basis for the fictional family in the novel.