Aria

"This extraordinary, gripping debut is a rags-to-riches-to-revolution tale about an orphan girl's coming-of-age in Iran. Margaret Atwood calls it "an Iranian Doctor Zhivago." It is the mid-1950s in a democratic but restless Iran, a country newly powerful with oil wealth but unsettled by class and religious divides and by the politics of a larger world hungry (especially the West) for its resources. One night, a humble driver in the Iranian army is walking through a rough area of Tehran when he hears a small, pitiful cry. Curious, he searches for the source, and to his horror, comes upon a…