In his latest novel, Daniel Nayeri explores a side of the Second World War that will be new to many readers young and old: the role of Iran. The Teacher of Nomad Land: A World War II Story (Levine Querido, September 16) centers on a 12-year-old Babek, whose father is killed when the British and Soviets invade the country in 1941. Following in his father’s footsteps, Babek leads his younger sister into the Zagros Mountains in hopes of becoming a teacher to a tribe of nomads; the pair encounter British soldiers, evade a Nazi spy, and join forces with a young Jewish refugee. The book, which won the National Book Award for young people’s literature last month, made our list of the Best Middle Grade of 2025, and Nayeri answered our questions by email.

What made you decide to set your novel in Iran?

As storytellers, we’re trained to look for the conflict in situations. It makes sense, then, that most people would look to the European and Pacific theaters—after all, those were warfronts. But one challenge I had for myself was to show the global nature of that conflict. Iran at that time was an occupied nation after the Anglo-Soviet invasion and, as result, [it was] a neutral territory for refugees from Europe to wait out the war. It [presented] different people at cross-purposes, and that’s always a good place to start a story.

Can you describe your research?

When I started this book, I had just finished The Many Assassinations of Samir, the Seller of Dreams, which is set along the Silk Road in the 11th century. The challenge there had been to dive deeply into how people lived. I [was] caught by a historian trying to have a character use his pockets when those hadn’t become common in clothing until centuries later in that part of the world. The research for Nomad Land had several advantages in that regard. First, life in the 1940s was much more recognizable to us now. They may not have had cell phones, but at least they had pockets! And second, the era is marked by the advent of film, which means I could watch much of the history with my own eyes in the form of documentaries. That was a delightful surprise for someone who spends much of his imagination in the centuries even before the printing press.

Why do so many writers (and readers) gravitate to this period?

I read once online that World War II represents a foundational event for the modern world, and I think it’s a decent assessment of our postwar era. That was the war that established the borders of the current world, for the most part. We still use the moral framework of that conflict as our own to assign who we think are “the bad guys.” And, in many ways, the rest of history from that moment forward was a reverberation [from] those events. Another way to say it is that I’m not sure we’ve yet resolved World War II.

What inspired you during the writing of the book? What were you reading, listening to, watching?

A type of Persian music from the 19^th century is called dastgah, wherein the singer wanders through various melodies—gushehs—to evoke various moods. It’s not quite chanting, and it’s not as discrete as a song. It’s a bit of a meander. I listened to this sort of thing on repeat and spent much of my time reading about the incredible ecosystem of the Zagros Mountains, imagining myself among the nomads. To be useful to them, it seems to me, would be a deeply satisfying thing—a theme that comes out in the story as well.

Mahnaz Dar is a young readers’ editor.