Published in 1952, the book centres around the taunted figure of Hazel Motes, a discharged WWII veteran who returns to his hometown to find it derelict and decayed. Seeing his childhood home entirely dissipated, he resolves to abandon it and any notion of the fundamentalist teachings he inherited through his long dead relatives. Instead, he decides to preach a new kind of refractory ‘Church without Christ’ that vows only to teach you the one truth: that there is no truth at all. 

Tackling themes of loneliness, duty, marriage, and rebellion, Savushun continues to be a hallmark of the tragedy and valour that characterises the history of Iran. It continues to be Iran’s most read book to date and has been reprinted more than twenty times.

Roaming Hollywood boulevard, Sophie engages with the milieu of L.A., working as a photographer, dabbling in acting in Rome, and becoming a groupie. Intertwining Sophie’s story with the older women she grew up around (such as her father’s German-Jewish friend Lola), Eve creates a narrative that is both sentimental and real, gripping yet playful, and compellingly humorous and intellectual. Even when Eve drifts into the tragical side, rest assured you are never “too far from a punch line”.

Like Anaïs, Sabina grapples with the feelings of guilt in deceiving her loving husband, while also finding some incitement in the cycles of passion and deceit, calling herself an “international spy in the house of love”. Drifting between realism and surrealism, Anaïs offers a poetic narration of Sabina’s despair in living out a piece of herself with each man, and her innermost desire to wield this pieces together and find a man could love all parts of her.