The best known books set in each country: Iran

I’m posting this on Saturday this week because my Hugos post will go up tomorrow (though not until after the official announcements). See here for methodology, though now I am restricting the table to books actually set in Iran.

TitleAuthorGoodreads
raters
LibraryThing
owners
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (vol 1 of 2)Marjane Satrapi212,2888,651
Reading Lolita in TehranAzar Nafisi 135,27613,103
The Complete PersepolisMarjane Satrapi186,2466,989
Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (vol 2 of 2)Marjane Satrapi75,9914,214
Ruba’iyatOmar Khayyám21,6725,246
Not Without My DaughterBetty Mahmoody35,4191,827
EmbroideriesMarjane Satrapi28,1131,960
Persepolis, Volume 1 (of the original four)Marjane Satrapi90,763554

Well, I’ve had cases where a single author dominates literary perception of a country, but this is the first time that I’ve had four slightly different versions of the same work in the top eight. And I must say I agree; Persepolis is an outstanding artistic achievement, and probably the first half of it is the crown. Also it’s nice that seven out of eight of these books are by actual Iranians.

I disqualified House of Sand and Fog, by Andre Dubus III, because it is set in the USA. But I let Persepolis 2 through because just under half of the book (the original part 3) is set in Austria and just over half (the original part 4) back in Iran.

I also allowed the Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam as being mainly set in Iran. Omar Khayyam may not have written all of the poems that are now attributed to him, but he was a very real Persian statesman, scientist and writer, and there are plenty of Iranian cultural references in the poems, which are told from a first-person perspective.

So we end up with five graphic novels (OK, two graphic novels, one of them in four different versions), two first-person factual accounts and one work of poetry. Not bad.

Next up: Türkiye.

India | China | USA | Indonesia | Pakistan | Nigeria | Brazil (revisited) | Bangladesh (revisited) | Russia | Mexico | Japan | Philippines (revisited) | Ethiopia (revisited) | Egypt | DR Congo | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Germany | France | Thailand | UK | Tanzania | South Africa | Italy | Myanmar | Kenya | Colombia | South Korea | Sudan | Uganda | Spain | Algeria | Iraq | Argentina | Afghanistan