My Father's Notebook

<p>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. </p><p>A stunning and ambitious novel by a singular literary talent <em>My Father's Notebook</em> 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. </p>