The House of the Mosque by Kader Abdolah

[zeborah]

Explores the rapidly changing eras of Iran's recent history through the eyes of one family. I never quite kept up with all the relationships between the characters, but still felt like I knew them. The prose is beautiful and deceptively simple; often much meaning is packed in an allusion and a silence. (As in the beginnings of a love affair where so little was explained in the characters' speech that a previous reader had pencilled in a question about this elision. I love marginalia, so pencilled in an answer: the trick was in applying the poetry under discussion as a metaphor to their relationship.)

A few tropes were a little cliched (skip spoiler - eg the death of the disabled boy by stumbling innocently into a political murder) so less effective than they could have been; but I had tears in my eyes more than once at the various dilemmas and difficulties faced by the main characters. The ending rang of autobiography, but I couldn't figure out whether that detracted from the fiction or added to the realism.