City of Lies

City of Lies

By Ramita Navai
$17.95
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“Taken together, the book’s eight compulsively readable chapters, each focused on a different Iranian, paint a harrowing portrait of the city today…Readers are granted a panoramic view of Tehrani society: from the faux-Greek mansions that house the nouveau riche in the city’s north, to a midtown bustling with students, merchants, and young women with ‘enough make-up to make a drag queen recoil,’ to the shacks and poverty of south Tehran.”

Wall Street Journal

Ramita Navai gives voice to ordinary Iranians forced to live extraordinary lives: the porn star, the aging socialite, the assassin and enemy of the state who ends up working for the Republic, the dutiful housewife who files for divorce, and the old-time thug running a gambling den.

In today's Tehran, intrigues abound and survival depends on an intricate network of falsehoods: mullahs visit prostitutes, local mosques train barely pubescent boys in crowd-control tactics, and cosmetic surgeons promise to restore girls' virginity. Navai paints an intimate portrait of those discreet recesses in a city where the difference between modesty and profanity, loyalty and betrayal, honor and disgrace is often no more than the believability of a lie.