The Persian Bride

Hailed as a masterpiece in Britain, this epic novel is at once a great love story, a riveting political thriller, and a profound analysis of modern Iran. It is the spring of 1974, and John Pitt, a young Englishman, sets off for the hippie East, stopping in Iran. There, in the lovely city of Isfahan, he meets the enchanting and spirited Shirin, an Iranian schoolgirl of seventeen. They fall desperately in love, marry in secret, and are forced into hiding. Shirin not only gives John happiness beyond anything he could have dreamed, she gives him her country's terrible history, its beauty and bitterness, its poetry and religious fanaticism. As the old world disintegrates in revolution and terror, John and Shirin are brutally separated. From the corrupt court of the shah to the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, in an enduring human quest as old as THE ODYSSEY, John stumbles through history to find his wife. James Buchan has lived in Iran and knows its people and its culture as few outsiders do. THE PERSIAN BRIDE is unflinching in its vision of twentieth-century chaos and deeply romantic in its marvelous love story. Lyrical and reflective in turn, this is a brilliant and beautiful novel.

Chapter 1Each night, says Molavi, the prisoner forgets his prison. Each night, he says, the tyrant forgets his power. Each night, when it seems the night will never end, when night appears to be the natural and unvarying condition of the universe, there is a breath of wind. Invisible, the wind shows itself in a rattle of branches; and then, an instant later, in a coolness on my wrists and ankles, and where my daughters cheek slithers on my chest. For that instant, I smell greenery and roses and water and methane and the scent of my daughters hair to which I cannot give a name, except that it is the quintessence of sweetness, brought with her from wherever it is she came. That breath of wind, which will not recur until this time tomorrow, is the only evidence of movement in my world: the sign that this house and garden, though I believe them to be stagnant and timeless, are subject to change. The wind, which originates out in the darkness, out beyond the town, in saltflats I have not seen, and passes through the town, blowing up sand at street-corners or flapping the tattered banners on the shrines of saints, exists both to make mehappy and to remind me of the insufficiency of happiness. The wind passes. My daughter, whose name is Layly, stirs against my chest as if she might recall the breath across her cheek and legs, as in a repetitive game, but it is gone: blown out through the curtained archway to the room where my wife lies sleeping. I sense, as I sense always at this time, that as the gust enters the mosquito net, passes over her as she sleeps, across her cheek that is creased by the rucked sheet or stuck with a strand of damp black hair, or where the sheet has fallen away, and her skirt ridden up to her breast, for precisely this reason, that she might feel the wind over her sore belly; and as I hear her stir, open her legs so that the wind might cool the inside of her legs and dry the sweat that shivers in tiny droplets on the silken hair above them, I believe that a change is being worked in her. I believe that the pain of childbirth is receding from her, and in her sleep, which is not sleep as the world knows it, for it has no depth or freshness, she feels the impression of her husband. She stirs, turns, mumbles something from a dream. Her water cup tinkles. Something slides to the floor. I shiver. I kiss the childs soft head and whisper: Settle down, my darling, and then Ill put you in your crib, for your mother and I have something to discuss. The child kicks out her feet, arches her soft back, sobs. My wife, whose physiology derives from Galen, says that Laylys stomach is cold. I believe that the babys distress is caused by air that she has swallowed with her milk but yet may be dislodged by movement. I turn and continue my pacing across the floor, which is made of blocks of dead coral, smooth and warm with use and damp from my footprints. For a year now, we have lived by window light. There is no moon

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Excerpted from The Persian Bride: A Novel by James Buchan
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