My Uncle Napoleon

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.

The narrator

The family garden

The garden

Almost everything happens inside one large walled garden shared by an extended family in several joined houses. On a summer afternoon the teenage narrator falls for his cousin Layli, and the household's feuds, matchmakings and rumours fill the rest of the book. The garden is invented, but its type, a mid-town Tehran family compound of the 1940s, was real.

Opening chapters

inspired by The walled compound of adjoining family houses is a fictional household, not a real address; it is sited here at a representative point in the mid-town garden district between the old centre and the northern hills.

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