My Father's Notebook

When he was a boy Aga Akbar the deaf-mute illegitimate son of a Persian nobleman traveled with his uncle to a cave on nearby Saffron Mountain. Once there he was to copy a three-thousand-year-old cuneiform inscription—an order of the first king of Persia—as a means of freeing himself from his emotional confinement. For the remainder of his life Aga Akbar used these cuneiform characters to fill a notebook with writings only he could understand. Years later his son Ishmael—a political dissident in exile—is attempting to translate the notebook . . . and in the process tells his father''s story his own and the story of twentieth-century Iran. A stunning and ambitious novel by a singular literary talent My Father''s Notebook is at once a masterful chronicle of a culture''s troubled voyage into modernity and the poignant timeless tale of a son''s enduring love.