Savushun

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.

Zari

The family house

The household

In the walled house and garden in Shiraz, Zari keeps her family and her composure amid the pressures of wartime occupation, her love for her husband set against her fear for him. Daneshvar makes the domestic world of women, the courtyard, the children, the household economy, the vantage from which the whole political tragedy is felt.

The opening chapters

explicit Zari's home and garden are set in Shiraz, the real city of Fars province where Daneshvar herself was born; sited in the city.

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