The Drum Tower - Hardcover

A terrifying, brave, wise novel, The Drum Tower is about far more than the revolution in Iran. It is about a girl who is trapped in a labyrinth of family history and mythology who has the courage to find her way out. Farnoosh Moshiri celebrates a deeper revolution in prose that I would follow anywhere. -- Simone Zelitch, author of Louisa and Moses in Sinai

She is Iran's Solzhenitsyn. Ms. Moshiri's first novel, At the Wall of the Almighty, remains an unrecognized masterpiece. One might have hoped its grudgingly won reputation, and the trail of her fiction, would have led the critics to her. The Drum Tower, her latest work, may well light the way. What characters, what language! The novel just flows, evolving from something ancient and primordial into a modern transcendent voice. Honestly, if I awoke some morning to find she had won the Nobel, I wouldn't be at all surprised. -- Juris Jurjevics, author of Red Flags and The Trudeau Vector, and former publisher of Soho Press

The Drum Tower is Farnoosh Moshiri's fourth work of fiction concerned with the deleterious effects of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. This novel, told by a mentally ill, 16-year-old girl, depicts the fall of Drum Tower, the house of a family descended from generations of War Ministers. Rich in characters-Talkhoon, who struggles to control the winds she hears inside her head and who tells the story; Assad, a man made evil by his love for her; Anvar Angha, Talkhoon's grandfather who has devoted his life to writing a book about the Simorgh (the mythical bird of knowledge; the Persian Phoenix) but never completes it; Soraya, Talkhoon's mother, whom we never meet but about whom myriad and contradictory stories abound-and rich in family secrets, this novel chronicles the early days of the revolution, the ruthlessness and opportunism of the competing factions, the rise of the Revolutionary Guard, the chaos and murder in the streets of Tehran, the arrests and executions, as experienced by the members of this family. The Drum Tower may be compared, favorably, to Gone with the Wind. It has already won two Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Fiction Awards and a Black Heron Press Award for Social Fiction. It has been licensed to the United Kingdom's Sandstone Press which will publish the British Commonwealth edition simultaneous with the Black Heron Press edition.