In The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran, shortlisted for the 2026 International Booker Prize, the 1979 Islamic Revolution is the primary force propelling the story forward. However, the narrative is less concerned with major events or key figures of the revolution than with the lives irrevocably changed by it.

This is the story of voices that, without the power of fiction, would have gone unheard.

Review: The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar, translated by Ruth Martin (Scribe)

The polyphonic (or multi-voiced) novel consists of four chapters and a prologue, following five members of one family after the revolution. Every chapter is separated from the next by a decade, while the prologue promises a free Iran, in an unknown – but not too distant – future.

Wishing for the ‘real revolution’

Behzad, a young communist teacher, and his two comrades, Sohrab and Peyman, are politically active in the early days after the revolution. They want to make the “real revolution” possible – “the people’s revolution in the institutions”. They each wish for a prosperous, independent country.

However, understanding the differences between Peyman’s worldview and that of his comrades is essential to understanding the failed attempts at democracy and reforms in modern Iran.

Peyman wishes for no photo of any individual to be put on the walls of a classroom again, after photographs of the shah are taken down. But Behzad and Sohrab look forward to a day when the pictures hung there depict Marx, Engels, Mao and Lenin: political figures alien to both the hearts and minds of a vast majority of Iranians.

Peyman, an artist at heart who always carries his camera, seems more interested in life than in revolution. He became politicised, like many others, only after the 1979 revolution. Before that, he was not interested in politics, nor the books his two friends read, or the ideas they promoted in their flyers.........

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