Description

This is an awe-inspiring memoir of a young girl, growing up in the tumultuous revolutionary Iran in the 80's, which sadly resonates with today's women led movement and horrendous arrest and executions of many young men and women in Iran. The author chronicles her early childhood with her Bibi (grandmother) as well as her imprisonment at the age of eighteen on trumped-up political charges. During her brutal incarceration in the women's cell block of the Shiraz Adelabad Prison in the southern Iran, she was tortured and made to live in harsh over-crowded conditions among many other young women, mostly high school and university students. Her brother, Mohammad, only twenty-four, was on death row for participating in the anti-government protests and was labeled "anti-revolution". The Ayatollah's Revolutionary Guard of Sepah imprisoned tens of thousands of students and executed many of them openly. Nastaran was born between the traditional upbringings of a girl her age and the call of the modern world. Bibi mesmerized her granddaughter with countless stories, traditional prayers and simple, yet profound wisdom gleaned from a harsh life. It is the contrast Nastaran paints between her relatively protected, if somewhat tangled, childhood and the nightmare of her time of suffering and torture in the Ayatollah's prison that makes this memoir so compelling, all the while shedding lights on the current event in Iran and the brutality of the Iranian regime against the defenseless Iranian people who are simply fighting for the basic human rights and freedom.

NASTARAN KHERAD was born in Abadan, Iran, but grew up in Shiraz, with her maternal grandmother, Bibi. After escaping Iran and living and studying in Germany, she moved to the U.S. to continue her education. She received her Master Degree in English and Comparative Literature and her Doctorate in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently an Associate Professor, teaching Middle Eastern Studies.