The Persians (2025)
Why this one?
More from the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist, which I am slowly working my way through.
Sanam Mahloudji (c. 1978- ; active 2016- ) was born in Tehran, Iran. The Persians (2025) has its roots in her 2018 short story “Auntie Shirin”, and is her debut novel. Like many of the characters in the book, Mahloudji and her parents left Iran in the wake of the Islamic Revolution, initially settling in the United States. After establishing herself as a lawyer in Los Angeles, a sense of disillusionment with the post-2016 American landscape led her to relocate to London, where she currently lives. Her stories and non-fiction essays have garnered numerous prestigious prizes and nominations.
Thoughts, etc.
The Persians focuses on the women from three generations of a wealthy and prestigious Iranian family, the Valiats, whose life paths bifurcated around the time of the Islamic Revolution. While sisters Shirin and Seema left (along with their brother, partners and Seema’s daughter Bita) for the USA, the family’s matriarch Elizabeth stayed behind in their homeland, as did - in more unusual circumstances - Shirin’s then six-year-old daughter Niaz.
The book begins in Shirin’s voice, as the US contingent are holidaying in luxury in Aspen, where amidst their usual aimless indulgences some drama emerges as Shirin is arrested, seemingly for attempting to sell her services to a police officer. From there, we jump back and forth in time to learn more about how the family got to this point, from Elizabeth’s youthful and ill-regarded courting of the son of the family’s chauffeur, to the contrasting lives of the granddaughters: Niaz in modern-day Iran, arranging parties as a form of underground protest against the regime; Bita a listless law student in the US, seeking some kind of purpose and contemplating giving away her inherited wealth.
At first I struggled to get into this one. I tried to pick it up straight after the mainly comic Fundamentally and it felt from its opening like it was going to be more of the same, but more annoying. The first chapter, lifted apparently very closely from its originating short story, is in some senses a bit of a false friend (or enemy, in my view). It throws you headfirst into contact with the book’s most difficult and seemingly obnoxious character, Shirin, living a somewhat ridiculous and over the top life of luxury in the US, and some of her family rolling their eyes in the background but also collectively seeming like pretty annoying exemplars of the idle rich. On reflection, this chapter is there to grab the attention and set the scene, and serves its purpose relatively well in that context. However, on first pass, I couldn’t get on with it and put it down for a while.
Picking it up again after a break, it didn’t take long for it to reveal it was a book of far more richness and depth than its introductory caricatures suggest. It’s a multi-layered and complex book, which leans far less into comedy than its opening or blurb would have you think. At its heart is an exploration of the choices made by the different family members at the point of their decision to leave Iran. Ostensibly, it’s Shirin and the rest of the family who seem to have made the smarter choice - to get out avoid war, oppression and a relative loss of wealth and status - but the world they’ve found themselves in is ultimately a superficial one in which they become disconnected from their heritage, begin to sense a kind of moral vacuity in their existences, and come to realise that they have left behind their family’s heart and soul (and with it, some buried secrets) in their homeland.
It’s the parallel lives of the granddaughters that probably best represents this. Bita has already seen her mother almost give up on life and then succumb to a terminal illness (Seema’s voice in the book is - intriguingly but only semi-effectively - from beyond the grave) and in the wake of this begins to ask serious questions about her purpose as she goes through the motions of a predictable career path for an affluent immigrant in New York, and eventually decides that she’s had enough and gets rid of everything. Niaz’s story is probably the most intriguing of all. The circumstances of her staying behind in Iran as her mother leaves her is part tragic misunderstanding, and part genuine abandonment from a self-obsessed parent, and ultimately heartbreaking in its unfolding. But even before we find out the detail of what happened, her story feels the most compelling and interesting, as we see her go through war and disempowerment in post-revolutionary Iran. While her path is one we’ve read about before, the real peril she faces and the urgency of her actions stands in stark contrast to the ennui and first-world-problem issues that much of the US family are ‘battling’. An interaction between the two cousins later in the book is telling, as Niaz’s visceral reactions to the mullahs controlling their lives back in Iran is dismissed by Bita as ‘problematic’ - showing that the latter has absorbed an entirely different (liberal, western, privileged) discourse that is utterly disconnected from the realities women face back at home.
It’s far from a perfect read, though. My biggest issue is that it feels uneven: while there’s a place for the deployment of stark contrasts to make the sorts of points it’s striving to make, they did often feel like big lurches between wildly differing themes. As mentioned, I enjoyed the sections in Iran far more than those in the US, but there’s probably more of the latter. The book’s central revelation of a family secret doesn’t quite land in terms of its intended weight in the scheme of things. Shirin continues to be profoundly annoying throughout, although her stubborn adherence to her path (however misguided) is in itself a quite impressive through-line, particularly in its courtroom denouement. Her sister, Seema, with her voice from the beyond the grave, felt like an interesting concept that was a little under-explored and ultimately felt like a missed opportunity to me.
Overall though there was enough (once past the initial blocker) to keep me interested and on the whole I’d say it was a fun, if bumpy, ride. While its characters were all rounded and complex, and certainly justify the book’s deliberate decision to focus on them rather than the men of the family (who pop up occasionally in the background as genuinely comically one-dimensional cliches), I’d have liked a book that was more about Niaz and Elizabeth and less about Shirin and Bita. It’s in the former characters that the book feels most generous and giving, in terms of the depiction of genuinely difficult life experiences and in terms of what is brutally revealed about the family as a whole by the story of Niaz’s childhood ‘decision’ to stay in Iran.
Score
7.5
Uneven and occasionally frustrating, there’s nonetheless plenty in this one to justify its position on the shortlist. Still not my ultimate favourite from the list so far, though.
Next up
Just got the Elizabeth Strout book to go on the Women’s Prize list, so working out whether to backfill any of my gaps in knowledge of its characters before I proceed…
