ARIA

An orphan grows up during decades of unrest in Iran.

Making an impressive fiction debut, Hozar creates a vibrant, unsettling portrait of her native Iran from the 1950s to 1981, a period beset by poverty and oppression, chaos and revolution. The tale begins in 1953, when a desperate new mother abandons her newborn in a garbage-strewn street in Tehran. While wild dogs scavenge through the trash, a man wandering through the neighborhood hears a muffled cry. Behrouz, an illiterate truck driver for the army, rescues the baby and impetuously names her Aria, for music that evokes “all the world’s pains and all the world’s loves.” Behrouz takes the infant home to his wife, Zahra, a hardhearted woman who resents her husband and balks at this new imposition and responsibility. In a culture rife with superstition, she is suspicious of the child, whose blue eyes, Zahra believes, “mean… the devil’s in her.” With Behrouz gone for weeks at a time, Zahra vents her anger at Aria, whom she beats and nearly starves. But as if in a fairy tale, suddenly the girl’s fortunes change: She finds herself in a new home, this time with an emotionally reticent woman who strives to do good works in order to atone for her privilege. As Aria later recalls, she had “a mother who left her, a mother who beat her, and a mother who loved her but couldn’t say so.” Aria goes to school, where her two closest friends are children whose parents hold drastically different views about Iran’s politics: The girl’s father is repeatedly arrested for being a communist while the boy’s wealthy family “sells the Shah his diamonds.” Cries of “Death to the Shah! Long live Khomeini!” portend the violent upheaval that changes the country’s—and Aria’s—future.

An engrossing tale that reveals a nation's fraught history.