Excerpt from The Gardens of Consolation by Parisa Reza, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

As she snoozes she becomes obscurely aware of a sound. She strains forward on the donkey's back and peers into the distance. The noise grows louder and suddenly rips through the peace of the desert. The source of the sound is hiding behind a cloud of dust, heading straight for her. The monster finally appears, a black headless hulk with bulging eyes set into its body, its round feet powering toward her at inconceivable speed, its mouth exhaling a horrifying scream. Her every ancestor's every nightmare instantly leaps to life in her mind. But at the last moment her survival instinct gets the better of her terror, and she jumps from the donkey and runs away, shrieking in horror and calling on all the saints for help.

Sardar is astonished to see his wife leap from the donkey with the agility of a tiger, and he takes a moment to realize Talla has never seen a car before. He has a lot of trouble calming her and persuading her to remount the donkey. How to explain cars to her? He himself took a while accepting that such contraptions could exist even though he did not understand how.

"We don't need to understand everything," he says. "If we had to stop every time we came across something new in a big city, we would travel as slowly as a tortoise. You just get used to it."

As for the passengers in the passing Renault, Talla's panic certainly made them laugh; they were quick to relate the anecdote when they arrived, roaring with laughter all over again. They were so used to the contraption they thought they had invented it.


Sardar is twenty this year. Three years earlier, after his father died and his inheritance was shared out with his three brothers, he called on his uncle and asked him to climb up the hill with him. This is where men go to discuss important matters. They climbed the hill side by side in silence, and at the top, overlooking all of Ghamsar, they could see the roofs of houses scattered among the orchards, as well as the river, the plantations, women's colorful scarves, flocks of sheep, and a few donkeys. Here Sardar turned to face his uncle, head lowered in deference to his elder, and told him he was leaving for Tehran, for good. Not saying whether he was seeking adventure or fortune. Then he asked whether his uncle would like to buy his land and his rifle. His uncle thought for a moment, then offered him five tomans for the lot, there and then. He did not try to hold his nephew back. Virtually no one ever sells land in Ghamsar; plots are handed from father to son and stay in the family. This was a godsend. Sardar was making a poor deal but a man cannot barter with his own uncle; uncles are owed respect and consideration, particularly as, since Sardar's father had died, this uncle had become head of the family. Sardar's land should stay in the family. Selling it to someone else at a better price would have been a betrayal. Sardar agreed, although he thought privately that his rifle alone was worth five tomans. And, on that same hill, he promised himself he would make a fortune with his five tomans so that word of this would one day reach his uncle's ears.

Sardar wanted to leave at any cost. He wanted to leave because he believed—no, he could feel—that this land was becoming cursed. Too many envious eyes had been cast over it. The outsiders who sometimes came to stay in Ghamsar, the dignitaries from Kashan who had built houses to enjoy the mild climate in summer or the isolation, far from the world, in the tranquility of their gardens, or even the traders from Kashan who sometimes came to sell their wares here; they must all have cast a spell on Ghamsar.

In less than fifty years, in his father's and grandfather's lifetime, Ghamsar had endured cholera, then an earthquake that destroyed everything. Death upon death . . . And in his own lifetime, famine. It was when he was nine, he remembers people selling off their land for a few zucchini, remembers being hungry, eating tree roots and meat from dead animals, remembers his mother dying in pregnancy, exhausted, and this on land that can provide a profusion of delectable foods. She died in this corner of paradise, so powerful was the curse.

Excerpted from The Gardens of Consolation by Parisa Reza. Copyright © 2016 by Parisa Reza. Excerpted by permission of Europa Editions. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.