A young Iranian-Italian woman returns to Tehran to uncover why her grandfather abandoned their family. Instead of a coward, she finds a revolutionary, a clandestine magazine, and a twin uncle erased from history. As bombs fall on the city, a forgotten house becomes her only link to the past, and a sanctuary for women with nowhere else to go.

Tehran, June 2025. Bombs are falling on the city. Farah – a twenty-nine-year-old Iranian-Italian doctoral student – is hiding in the cellar of a crumbling house, reading her mother Parvaneh ‘s secret diary while plaster rains from the ceiling. She has told her mother she is safely in Italy. She is not.

Farah returned to Tehran for her grandmother Nanà’s funeral – and to follow a lead. In a final lucid moment, Nanà pressed a rusty key and a street address into her hand. The key opens an abandoned house in a derelict district of the city. Inside: dozens of copies of a clandestine leftist magazine, Tala and Siyah, 1983–84, its editorials signed with a single initial: F. For Farid. Her grandfather – the man her mother always described as a selfish coward who abandoned his sick wife and teenage daughter in 1986 and disappeared to Italy.

The house slowly dismantles that lie. Farid was not a coward. He was a revolutionary – a veteran leftist activist who, at the height of the Islamic Republic’s repression and during the brutal Iran–Iraq war, ran a clandestine editorial collective from this very cellar, linking Iranian labour struggles to the international left. When the Pasdaran raided a public presentation of the magazine in December 1984, the entire team was arrested – including many of Parvaneh’s family, people Farah will never know, and history will erase, because in that country it is a political act to mourn the wrong dead.

Around Farah, as the war escalates, gathers an unlikely household. Saba – a woman in a red veil who crashes into Farah on the street outside the house – is escaping a husband who kept her sedated and isolated; she needs to recover her traumatised four-year-old son. Gulbano is an undocumented Afghan domestic worker, single mother to the irrepressible Anahita, whose precariousness intensifies when the regime, once the bombing stops, turns its violence inward and begins mass-deporting Afghans. The forgotten house becomes their shelter, their headquarters, their collective act of survival. When Parvaneh finally arrives, the reckoning between mother and daughter can no longer be postponed.

Moshir Pour – born in Tehran, based in Italy, one of the most prominent Iranian-European public voices of her generation – writes from the inside. The texture is specific: coffee-ground divination, the grammar of mother-daughter combat, the long shadow of 1979. But the architecture travels: a diaspora child excavating a silenced family past, a house that holds what official history erases, women building solidarity under siege. Set in an almost-now (an imagined 2025 Israeli–Iranian war, a speculative extrapolation of real tensions), the novel has the velocity of reportage without the constraint of fact.

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