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Also by Shokoofeh Azar:

The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen, June 2025
Hardcover / e-Book

THE GOWKARAN TREE IN THE MIDDLE OF OUR KITCHEN
By: Shokoofeh Azar

Europa Editions
June 2025
On Sale: June 10, 2025
528 pages
ISBN: B0DGWVPVZW
EAN: 9798889660972
Kindle: B0DB5MVF7W
Hardcover / e-Book
Add to Wish List

Saga | Literature and Fiction Literary | Women's Fiction Family Life

From International Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist Shokoofeh Azar, comes a stylistically audacious and emotionally powerful novel about one large, complicated family and a love affair lasting decades.

Spanning fifty years in the history of modern Iran, this lush, layered story embraces politics and family, revolution and reconstruction, loss and love as it recounts the colorful destinies of twelve children who get lost one long-ago night inside a mysterious palace.

Azar’s first novel, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree (Europa Editions, 2020), was shortlisted for the Stella Prize for Fiction and the International Booker Prize; it was longlisted for the PEN America Award and the National Book Award for Translated Literature.

In Azar’s new novel, each lost child’s story unfolds against the backdrop of immense cultural and political transformation; lovers must survive war, revolution, and rigid social strictures to keep their love alive; family bonds are tested, especially those indissoluble connections between the living and the dead. The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen is also the moving story of one family’s efforts to preserve the richness of Iranian culture in the face of Islamic hegemony following the 1979 revolution.