The next book to be featured on the Sara Cox Radio 2 Book Club is The Lion Women of Tehran, the heartfelt new novel from Marjan Kamali. The book was released on 21 November and Marjan’s interview with Sara is on BBC Sounds now.
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The Lion Women of Tehran
In 1950s Tehran, seven-year-old Ellie lives in grand comfort until the untimely death of her father, forcing Ellie and her mother to move to a tiny home downtown. Lonely and bearing the brunt of her mother’s endless grievances, Ellie dreams of a friend to alleviate her isolation.
Luckily, on the first day of school, she meets Homa, a kind, passionate girl with a brave and irrepressible spirit. Together, the two girls play games, learn to cook in the stone kitchen of Homa’s warm home, wander through the colorful stalls of the Grand Bazaar, and share their ambitions for becoming ‘lion women’.
But their happiness is disrupted when Ellie and her mother are afforded the opportunity to return to their previous bourgeois life. Now a popular student at the best girls’ high school in Iran, Ellie’s memories of Homa begin to fade. Years later, however, her sudden reappearance in Ellie’s privileged world alters the course of both of their lives.
Together, the two young women come of age and pursue their own goals for meaningful futures. But as the political turmoil in Iran builds to a breaking point, one earth-shattering betrayal will have enormous consequences.
About the author
Marjan Kamali, born in Turkey to Iranian parents, spent her childhood in Kenya, Germany, Turkey, Iran, and the United States. After graduating from UC Berkeley, she received her MBA from Columbia University and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She is the award-winning author of The Stationery Shop of Tehran and Together Tea. Her novels have been published in more than 20 languages. Her essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Literary Hub and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and her work has also been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in two anthology collections: Tremors and Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been. Marjan is a 2022 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. She lives with her husband and two children in the Boston area
A word from Marjan
“I am thrilled that The Lion Women of Tehran has been selected for the BBC Radio 2 Book Club and thank The Reading Agency and UK librarians who recommended my book! My first job at age fifteen was at our local library. As I shelved books, I dreamed of one day becoming a writer. I grew up moving a lot and whenever we arrived in a new city, my mother would take us to the local library. It always became a second home. This novel was written during the pandemic when libraries were closed. I had to create my own sense of community and connection with the characters of Ellie and Homa. I couldn’t stop thinking about how the friends we make when we are young shape us. Their influence lasts even if the friendship doesn’t. And friendship breakups are just as heart-wrenching as romantic ones.
In The Lion Women of Tehran, Ellie and Homa share the joys of girlhood, ups and downs of adolescence, and go off to university together. But their friendship is ruptured by an inadvertent betrayal until decades later they reconnect in America. All along, one of them fights for Iranian women to be free. The power of fiction is that it helps us not just see what happened in geopolitics but understand how those circumstances make people feel. I am deeply grateful to The Reading Agency and the BBC Radio 2 Book Club for helping me share this story with readers in the UK and the world.”
Get involved
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