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Goldsboro Books

The Age of Orphans

The Age of Orphans

by Laleh Khadivi

Publisher Bloomsbury

Genre:

Released:

  • Signed by the Author
  • UK First Edition
  • First Printing
  • Hardcover

£50.00
£50.00
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  • Book Condition & Notes

    All of our books that a have dust wrapper are covered in clear protective, removable film and are packed professionally in bubble wrap and a box for shipping so that they reach you in perfect condition.

About the book

Kurdistan, Persia. A village high in the Zagros mountains. A small green-eyed boy wrestles free from his mother and climbs atop a straw and mud hut to gaze at the dusty landscape; the jagged mountains and azure sky, the cattle in the distance. With his arms stretched out beside him he pretends to be a bird, to lift up and soar over this land: the land of his fathers and forefathers. Kurdish land. Soon after the boy is ritually initiated into manhood, messengers from the hills bring whispers of war; rumours that the Shah's army is moving from village to village, stamping out any tribal rebellion that may stand in the way of the creation of a unified 'Iran'. Just nine years old, the boy must stand alongside his men and fight for their land. Years later, Reza Pahlavi Khourdi can only faintly recall the brutal murder of his father and cousins. Orphaned on the bloody battlefield, conscripted into the great column of the army and given a new name, he has quickly risen up the ranks, proving both his prowess in battle and allegiance to the Shah's troops. Now in Tehran, Reza is about to marry to a beautiful, educated, city girl, and become a Capitian. But there are stirrings within his heart. He will soon move west to be the Shah's servant in Kermanshah, the land of his birth, and a figurehead of modernization. At once rich and bleak, The Age of Orphans unleashes a tapestry of untold horrors and pleasures, of blood and smoke, hopes, dreams and desires. It is a profound and darkly poetic story of a land roughly sewn together under the ambitious imagining of a nation, and of the life of a boy whose identity does not - can not - unite with this vision.

About the Author

Laleh Khadivi

Khadivi was born to a Kurdish family in Esfahan, Iran, in 1977. Shortly after the Iranian Revolution, she emigrated to the United States with her family in 1979, settling in the San Francisco Bay Area. She graduated from Reed College and from Mills College with an MFA. In 2002 she began to research the Kurds, particularly their fate in the southwestern region of Iran under the first Shah. Her first novel, The Age of Orphans, is the story of a Kurdish boy whose father is killed in a battle with the Iranian army in 1921. The boy is captured, becomes a soldier and eventually is turned into an oppressor of his own people.

Khadivi has worked extensively as a documentary filmmaker. She taught at Emory University as the 2007–2009 Fiction Fellow. She also taught creative writing at Santa Clara University during the 2010–2011 school year. She resides in San Francisco, California, where she is a professor in the Writing department at University of San Francisco. Her debut novel, The Age of Orphans, has been translated into Dutch, Hebrew, and Italian.

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