num_pages: 336
description: 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.
language: English
title: My Father's Notebook: A Novel of Iran
titlecomplete: My Father's Notebook: A Novel of Iran
characters: Aga Akbar, Ismail Mahmud Ghaznavi Khorasani
genres: Roman, Asia, Novels, School, Historical Fiction, Literature, Dutch Literature, Literary Fiction, Fiction, Iran
ratings_count: 2852
awards: awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
category: Longlist, awardedAt: 946713600000
name: E. du Perronprijs, awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: Vondel Prize
category: Susan Massotty, awardedAt: 1293868800000
name: Metų verstinė knyga
publisher: Harper Perennial