Mapped
Alamut
Vladimir Bartol
In eleventh-century Persia, Hasan-i Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain, builds the sect of the Assassins at the fortress of Alamut, and makes his young fedayeen die on command by convincing them, through a hidden garden of drugged pleasures, that he can send them to paradise and back. Bartol sets it at the real crag of Alamut in the Alborz mountains: the fortress itself, the secret gardens behind it, the training grounds of the fedayeen, and the roads down which the assassins are sent against the great men of the age.
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My Uncle Napoleon
Iraj Pezeshkzad
A comic novel of an extended family penned into a walled garden of adjoining houses in mid-town Tehran during the WWII Allied occupation. A teenage narrator loves his cousin Layli while the paranoid patriarch, Dear Uncle Napoleon, reads British plots into every ordinary event. The wider city, its bazaar and squares and the foreign troops in its streets, frames the household's quarrels. The map runs from the old central quarters up through the mid-town garden district to the summer retreats of Shemiran.
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Savushun
Simin Daneshvar
In Shiraz during the Allied occupation of Iran in the Second World War, Zari watches her idealistic landowner husband Yusof refuse to sell his grain to the foreign army while famine and intrigue close in around their family. The first novel by an Iranian woman, and one of the most beloved in Persian, Daneshvar's Savushun maps a real Fars: the city and the family house and garden, the estates and villages Yusof will not betray, the restless tribes, and the mourning that gives the book its name.
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