Mostofi, S.
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S. Mostofi
S. Mostofi was born and raised in Tehran, Iran. After the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty, the Islamic regime prohibited her father, an executive at one of the major banks in Tehran, from traveling for fifteen years and stripped her family of their wealth and position. Meanwhile, many of her relatives escaped or were executed for trivial reasons.
The first in her family to immigrate to the United States, S. Mostofi came to America in the 1990s at the age of sixteen. She wrote the first draft of Cemetery of Dreams when she was fourteen years old in Iran. In 2004 she returned to it, eventually rewriting and revising it.
S. Mostofi now lives in California with her husband. Cemetery of Dreams is her first novel.
In the wake of the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis, Arman seeks to avoid his country's political turmoil and focus on his own problems. His father, a former general under the Shah, is in the hospital. His American fiancée, Julia, the daughter of one of the hostages, is in hiding in his home and growing increasingly distraught as the crisis stretches on.
But when a former agent in the Shah's secret police blackmails him into joining a CIA-supported coup against the new regime, Arman is drawn into the revolutionary vortex.
A fast-paced political thriller set against a finely detailed historical and cultural backdrop, Cemetery of Dreams shows lower-class Iranians who used the revolution for revenge against the upper classes, patriots who joined the revolution to end the Shah's tyranny, and the opportunists who were willing to turn any political upheaval to their advantage.
With Iranian domestic turmoil once again making headlines, Cemetery of Dreams gives an alternative perspective on the rescue mission and an insider's view into the social currents that continue to fracture one of the most influential players in the Middle East—and subsequently the world.