When he was a boy, Aga Akbar, the illegitimate, deaf son of a Persian nobleman, travelled with his uncle to a cave on nearby Saffron Mountain. Once there, he was to transcribe a cuneiform inscription over three thousand years old. Decades later, his son, Ishmael - a political dissident in exile - attempts to translate a notebook filled with a private language made from this ancient script . . . and in the process tells his father's story, his own, and the story of twentieth-century Iran.
My Father's Notebook is at once a masterful chronicle of a culture's troubled voyage into modernity and the heart-rending, timeless tale of a son's enduring love.
Kader Abdolah (a pen name created in memoriam to friends who died under persecution by the current Iranian regime) was born in Iran in 1954. While a student of physics in Tehran, he joined a secret leftist party that fought against the dictatorship of the shah and the subsequent dictatorship of the ayatollahs. Abdolah wrote for an illegal journal and clandestinely published two books in Iran. In 1988, he arrived in the Netherlands as a political refugee. Kader Abdolah is the author of several books, including the novels My Father's Notebook, The House of the Mosque and most recently The King which has been longlisted for the 2016 International DUBLIN Literary Award. He has received several awards, including the Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres decoration in 2008.
When he was a boy, Aga Akbar, the illegitimate, deaf son of a Persian nobleman, travelled with his uncle to a cave on nearby Saffron Mountain. Once there, he was to transcribe a cuneiform inscription over three thousand years old. Decades later, his son, Ishmael - a political dissident in exile - attempts to translate a notebook filled with a private language made from this ancient script . . . and in the process tells his father's story, his own, and the story of twentieth-century Iran.
My Father's Notebook is at once a masterful chronicle of a culture's troubled voyage into modernity and the heart-rending, timeless tale of a son's enduring love.
Kader Abdolah (a pen name created in memoriam to friends who died under persecution by the current Iranian regime) was born in Iran in 1954. While a student of physics in Tehran, he joined a secret leftist party that fought against the dictatorship of the shah and the subsequent dictatorship of the ayatollahs. Abdolah wrote for an illegal journal and clandestinely published two books in Iran. In 1988, he arrived in the Netherlands as a political refugee. Kader Abdolah is the author of several books, including the novels My Father's Notebook, The House of the Mosque and most recently The King which has been longlisted for the 2016 International DUBLIN Literary Award. He has received several awards, including the Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres decoration in 2008.
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