The Persian Bride by John Buchan was published in Britain in 1999 (the TLS reviewer called it the "best novel of the year") and in the U.S. in 2000. The book is something of a memory puzzle as the narrator, John Pitt, recalls with a sort of hallucinatory clarity his trip as a young Englishman to Iran in 1974. He's apolitical, hippie-ish, mostly ignorant of history--which immediately catches hold of him as he falls for Shirin, a 17-year-old schoolgirl, protected child of a wealthy and powerful family, who are also about to be caught up in the churning politics of the time. The two marry in secret and run away, and through Shirin, the beauty and poetry of Iran's past opens up for John (and the reader) even as the corruption and revolution and religious fanaticism of the present overtake the couple, who are violently separated, leaving John to lurch through war and upheaval, in Iran, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, searching for his wife.
Filtered through John's tormented memory, the story is as haunting as a beautiful dream seen through a nightmarish reality. It has the rare quality of life learned and history lived, a precise and personal experience of a world brutally, inexorably becoming the one we know. The Persian Bride was last reprinted by Mariner in 2002 ($19.95, 9780618219230). Despite its dreamlike, timeless quality, it seemed remarkably timely then and seems if anything even more so now. --Ellen Akins, author of Home Movie, Little Woman, Public Life and Hometown Brew