Aria

First Title Value for Searching:

Aria

Personal Author:

Hozar, Nazanine

Edition:

First American edition.

Physical Description:

434 pages ; 24 cm.

Genre:

Historical fiction.

Summary:

"Iran in the 1950s is wealthy in oil but riven by divisions of class, ethnicity, and religion, and its corrupt government is under foreign influence. At this volatile moment, an illiterate driver rescues a redheaded, blue-eyed baby girl who has been abandoned in a Tehran alley and names her Aria. When he can no longer care for her, he finds her a new home, setting her on an unlikely path from extreme deprivation to a life of privilege. Along the way, Aria acquires three mother figures with secrets of their own: one who abuses her, one who adopts her, and one whose role in her life is initially mysterious. At university, Aria is drawn ever further from her poverty-stricken past, until the 1979 revolution brings her various worlds violently together again. She and her friends are swept up in the excitement and danger as the shah is overthrown, but the final stage of the revolution will bring the Ayatollah Khomeini to power at the head of a brutal theocracy--just as Aria has become a mother herself. Nazanine Hozar's stunning debut gives us an unusually intimate view of a momentous time, through the eyes of a young woman coming to terms with the mysteries of her own past and future"--

Subject Term:

Orphans -- Fiction

Adoptive parents -- Fiction.

Publication Info:

New York : Pantheon Books, [2020]

Subject:

Orphans -- Fiction

Adoptive parents -- Fiction.

Historical fiction.

Adopting parents

SAILS ISBN:

9781524749033

Available:

Library	Shelf Number	Shelf Location	Status
Searching... Dartmouth - Southworth	FIC HOZ	FICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Foxboro - Boyden Library	FIC HOZAR	FICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Taunton Public Library	HOZAR, NAZANINE	1ST FLOOR STACKS	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

An extraordinary, cinematic saga of rags-to-riches-to-revolution that follows an orphan girl coming of age in Iran at a time of dramatic upheaval

It is the 1950s in a restless Iran, a country rich in oil but deeply divided by class and religion. The government is unpopular and corrupt and under foreign sway. One night, an illiterate army driver hears the pitiful cry of a baby abandoned in an alley and menaced by ravenous wild dogs. He snatches up the child and takes her home, naming her Aria--the first step on an unlikely path from deprivation to privilege. Over the next two decades, the orphan girl acquires three mother figures whose secrets she will learn only much later: reckless and self-absorbed Zahra, who abuses her; wealthy and compassionate Fereshteh, who adopts her; and mysterious Mehri, whose connection to Aria is both a blessing and a burden.

A university education opens a new world to Aria, and she is soon caught up in the excitement and danger of the popular uprising against the Shah that sweeps through the streets of Tehran. The novel's heart-pounding, explosive finale sees the Ayatollah Khomeini's brutal regime seize power--even as Aria falls in love and becomes a mother herself.

Nazanine Hozar's stunning debut gives us an unusually intimate view of a momentous time, through the eyes of a young woman coming to terms with the mysteries of her own past and future.

Reviews (3)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Hozar's towering bildungsroman debut, already an international bestseller, spans three decades, capturing the maturation of the novel's protagonist, Aria, amid the Iranian Revolution. Abandoned by her mother in Tehran as a baby in 1953, Aria spends her early years raised by a military driver, Behrouz, and his abusive wife, Zahra, who often locks the girl outside and denies her food. After Aria contracts trachoma at age six, Behrouz arranges to send her to live with Zahra's former employer, the wealthy Fereshteh, who takes in the girl as her own daughter, enrolls her in school, and forces her to visit the home of the less-fortunate Shirazi family to teach the household's children to read. Years pass, and Aria, along with childhood friends Hamlet and Mitra, completes high school and enrolls in university, where she crosses paths with disciples of Ayatollah Khomeini, who they claim will create a better Iran. As Tehran grows more violent, Aria realizes Hamlet is in love with her, and she must navigate his affections while they both become entangled in the growing uprising against the Shah. Hozar expertly weaves people in and out of Aria's life and crafts a living, breathing environment for her heroine to inhabit, and brings things to a charged climax. This will be hard for readers to shake. (Aug.)

Kirkus Review

An orphan grows up during decades of unrest in Iran. Making an impressive fiction debut, Hozar creates a vibrant, unsettling portrait of her native Iran from the 1950s to 1981, a period beset by poverty and oppression, chaos and revolution. The tale begins in 1953, when a desperate new mother abandons her newborn in a garbage-strewn street in Tehran. While wild dogs scavenge through the trash, a man wandering through the neighborhood hears a muffled cry. Behrouz, an illiterate truck driver for the army, rescues the baby and impetuously names her Aria, for music that evokes "all the world's pains and all the world's loves." Behrouz takes the infant home to his wife, Zahra, a hardhearted woman who resents her husband and balks at this new imposition and responsibility. In a culture rife with superstition, she is suspicious of the child, whose blue eyes, Zahra believes, "mean… the devil's in her." With Behrouz gone for weeks at a time, Zahra vents her anger at Aria, whom she beats and nearly starves. But as if in a fairy tale, suddenly the girl's fortunes change: She finds herself in a new home, this time with an emotionally reticent woman who strives to do good works in order to atone for her privilege. As Aria later recalls, she had "a mother who left her, a mother who beat her, and a mother who loved her but couldn't say so." Aria goes to school, where her two closest friends are children whose parents hold drastically different views about Iran's politics: The girl's father is repeatedly arrested for being a communist while the boy's wealthy family "sells the Shah his diamonds." Cries of "Death to the Shah! Long live Khomeini!" portend the violent upheaval that changes the country's--and Aria's--future. An engrossing tale that reveals a nation's fraught history. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

Behrouz, an army truck driver, rescues an abandoned newborn in an alley and brings her to his unhappy home with Zahra, an older woman his family forced him to marry. Gentle Behrouz names his found daughter Aria because such songs express "all the world's pains and all the world's loves." Her blue eyes are considered a curse, one excuse for Zahra's horrific abuse, which Aria endures with the help of the admiring boy next door and a handsome, well-off army captain who initiates a dangerous affair with illiterate Behrouz. When fate brings Aria to the wealthy yet precarious household of kind Fereshteh, anguished secrets about Aria's birth mother and Zahra's misery are slowly revealed. Beginning in 1953 and concluding in 1981, Hozar's ample, many-faceted, vivid, and operatic debut novel encompasses sexual violence and injustice, the vast economic and educational disparities between north and south Tehran, and the coalescence and consequences of the Iranian Revolution. Lacing cultural, political, and religious conflicts into the dramatic and tumultuous lives of her entangled characters, Hozar reveals the complexities of Iran's glories and tragedies.

Excerpts

PROLOGUE 1953 Mehri opened her eyes. She was lying on a mound of carpets. "Does he look like his father?" she asked. The old man, Karimi, was holding the baby. "She doesn't know?" he whispered, turning to his wife. "She feels it," Fariba said, glancing at Mehri. Fariba was much younger than her husband, and she was Mehri's one friend. "I can tell she doesn't know," Karimi insisted. "Keep quiet. Are you massaging the baby like I showed you?" "Yes, yes." He rubbed the baby's chest and back. "What have we got ourselves into?" Fariba said. "Keep rubbing." She grabbed a chunk of meat from the cooler and put it in a frying pan. "It's for the mother. Not for you," she said to her husband. She glanced back at Mehri. "She ruined her life the moment she laid eyes on that man. I told her to work for you, here at the bakery, instead. But she said she'd rather be his wife. Now look what's happened." After a minute, Karimi asked, "Wife, why doesn't the baby make a sound?" "Because her eyes are blue," Fariba said. "And she's cursed, like her mother." -- Mehri had stayed motionless under a blanket for hours, her back against the wall. She was ashamed to look at her friend. "I warned you about marrying him, didn't I?" Fariba said. "How many times did I say he'd beat you?" At last, Fariba wrapped the baby, pressed her against her own breast, and approached Mehri. "Don't you want to hold her?" she asked. Mehri said nothing. "You can't pretend she doesn't exist. Yes, she's a girl. But it's not so bad." "He's going to kill me," Mehri said. Karimi was leaning against the wall, too, his face hidden behind his paper. But his hands trembled. They ached from helping Mehri give birth. And now he was embarrassed to look at her. "You know, husband, if we had a radio, you wouldn't need to read the paper. You can barely hold it up," Fariba said to him. "They say there are so many things to hear on the radio. Little plays. Would be nice to hear one of those." She turned away from Mehri and lit a match to the coal in the stove. Karimi pushed his reading glasses to the tip of his nose and folded the paper. "Nonsense," he said. "You worry about your little radio when most of those northerners are showing off their televisions. And all those years ago I taught myself to read--so why shouldn't I read the paper? Nobody else back then knew how to read. Not my mother, not my father. I was the only kid up and down these streets who could do it. Figured out the letters on my own, and you--" What's a television?" Mehri asked suddenly, looking up. She caught a glimpse of the baby's hair under the light. It was a reddish brown, like the father's. "A movie screen, only smaller," Karimi said, without looking up. "It's small enough to fit in a room. They have them all over the North-City. Mossadegh was on one the other day." "Why was our prime minister on television?" "To show he was alive. Somebody tried to kill him. Probably the filthy British." Karimi turned back to his paper. "Damn them all. If it isn't the communists, it's the English, and if it isn't the English, it's those darned turban lovers thinking they're as good as God. If it isn't--" Fariba slammed down the kettle. "This poor girl nearly died tonight, and you worry about your politicians?" "None of your scolding in front of her," Karimi said. "And dammit, nobody loves this country anymore. Except him . Mossadegh is great. Great, I'm telling you!" Mehri closed her eyes again and pretended to sleep. "This is a woman's matter," Karimi added, more softly, nodding at Mehri. "You want the neighbours to talk? We can't keep her here." "That's all right, Mr. Karimi," said Fariba, "you just sit right there and drink your tea and read your paper. Just think about what your great Mr. Mossadegh would think of you." For the next two days, Mehri refused to hold the baby, even when the father, Amir, kicked at the door of Karimi's bakery downstairs. Fariba hollered at Amir from the second-floor balcony that his son was no son, but very much a girl. Amir said, "Then bring her down so I can kill her." "You need to name her," Fariba said, turning to Mehri. "Now." But by the end of the day, the infant was still nameless. And Amir still sat at the door, waiting to kill the child. "He barks at people when they walk into the bakery," Fariba said. She bounced the baby in her arms. "I had to feed her dry milk, you know. Not good for her." Fariba shifted her weight where she sat on the Persian rugs covering the floor. She gulped down the last of her gin from a tea glass. When she was finished, she slapped the glass on the rug. "There's always your brother." "He won't help," Mehri said. "You've always said that, but you don't know. And that boy Amir would rather kill his daughter than pay for her. Got anybody besides your brother?" "No." Karimi entered the room and sat beside his wife. "You still unwell, child?" he asked Mehri. His voice was kind but weary. He had known Mehri since she was thirteen, a younger friend of Fariba's, who was five years older. He could hardly bear to see her pain. Mehri covered herself with her veil and cast down her eyes. She bit into a soft corner of the material. It hadn't been washed for weeks. Sometimes when she walked the streets she wondered if others could smell her. Fariba unfolded her thick legs and stood up, the baby in her arms. "Wife," Karimi said, rising as well. "Put the baby down and come here." They whispered as they walked into the next room. Mehri could hear them--only pieces and bits, but enough. "I can't do it," she heard Karimi say. "Are you ready to pay their way?" Fariba said. "This is my house. Don't you forget where your place is, woman!" "She's my friend. I do what I want with my friends. And I know that girl. She's lying about her brother." "The government won't do anything for a family like that," Karimi said. "That's their people's burden, then," Fariba said. "I don't know what to tell you, husband. If it weren't for the laws--" "Other than the laws, what do we do about him ?" "Him, we'll figure out later. I'll cut off his orange-haired head if I have to." Excerpted from Aria: A Novel by Nazanine Hozar All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.