Eamonn Gearon
Return to Tehran
The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran
By Hooman Majd
Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 254pp £20 order from our bookshop
The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay is an entertaining and insightful account of a year in Iran. It is written by an Iranian-born American who decides it is time for his American wife and their infant son to experience his homeland; the country they find is both alien and familiar. Think A Year in Provence with pollution and religious police.
Born in Tehran, Hooman Majd is a New York-based journalist who has lived in the West since infancy; his father, a former diplomat under the Shah, lives in London. Majd’s is not the only story of a family forced into exile in 1979, but there is in this tale the
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'For all his reputation as the great theorist of democracy, Tocqueville was never an enthusiast for universal suffrage or the kind of electoral politics that went with it.'
Alan Ryan asks what Alexis de Tocqueville's ideas can teach us today.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/oui-the-people
'Within two days of arriving at the retreat, he is called away to attend the funeral of a friend killed in the Charlie Hebdo attacks ... Carrère is soon divorced and suicidal, interned in a psychiatric institution where he must slowly rebuild his life.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/lunge-twist-pose
'Foreign-policy pundits, then as now, tended to lack subtlety, even if they could be highly articulate about a nation they did not like very much.'
Read Lucy Wooding's review of Clare Jackson's 'Devil-Land', which has won the @WolfsonHistory prize.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-view-from-across-the-channel