From the Publisher
An important new novel, not-to-be-missed... A sharply observed, painfully intimate and illuminating vision of Iran that will be invaluable to readers.” — Joyce Carol Oates
“I found Amir Arian’s Then the Fish Swallowed Him a strange and startling vision written with the ferocity of an endangered artist and the lyric eloquence of a master. The world conjured up in these pages will haunt the reader with a real, palpable but entertaining dread much like the Iranian classic, The Blind Owl. It is a debut of genuine brilliance and wit.” — Chigozie Obioma, Man Booker Shortlisted author of The Fisherman and An Orchestra of Minorities
“Then the Fish Swallowed Him had me gripped from the start, I couldn’t turn away. A story about power and the way it can hold us in its cruel grasp. This is a novel of our times. Revealing, dark and illuminating, beautiful and tense.” — Christy Lefteri, author of The Beekeeper of Aleppo
“Then the Fish Swallowed Him is a gripping, intelligent novel, opening vistas of the imagination with economy and insight. Harrowing and clear as a bell.” — Isabella Hammad, author of The Parisian
“In this stunning work, Arian accomplishes a rare feat by telling a captivating story of an unforgettable character and by bearing witness to the hard truths endured by political prisoners everywhere.”
— Booklist (starred review)
“A distressing, smartly interior tale of the horrors sown by oppressive politics.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Chigozie Obioma
I found Amir Arian’s Then the Fish Swallowed Him a strange and startling vision written with the ferocity of an endangered artist and the lyric eloquence of a master. The world conjured up in these pages will haunt the reader with a real, palpable but entertaining dread much like the Iranian classic, The Blind Owl. It is a debut of genuine brilliance and wit.
Isabella Hammad
Then the Fish Swallowed Him is a gripping, intelligent novel, opening vistas of the imagination with economy and insight. Harrowing and clear as a bell.
Joyce Carol Oates
An important new novel, not-to-be-missed... A sharply observed, painfully intimate and illuminating vision of Iran that will be invaluable to readers.
Christy Lefteri
Then the Fish Swallowed Him had me gripped from the start, I couldn’t turn away. A story about power and the way it can hold us in its cruel grasp. This is a novel of our times. Revealing, dark and illuminating, beautiful and tense.”
Booklist (starred review)
In this stunning work, Arian accomplishes a rare feat by telling a captivating story of an unforgettable character and by bearing witness to the hard truths endured by political prisoners everywhere.”
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2019-12-23
A Tehran bus driver is arrested during a strike, making him a pawn of Iranian politics and a victim of cruel imprisonment.
Yunus, the narrator of this brisk and piercing protest novel, is a demure middle-aged man who's striven to keep the turmoil of Iranian politics at arm's length: The 1979 revolution was overshadowed by his father's death and his mother's ensuing depression and maybe suicide. So he's blithely confident his participation in a 2005 drivers' strike can only be perceived as a reasonable plea for better treatment, not part of a global insurrection against the Ahmadinejad regime. What's the harm of reading Foucault and Marx with fellow union members? Plenty, the regime believes, and after Yunus beats a young counterprotester in a fit of anger, he's arrested, sent to Tehran's fearsome Evin prison, and told his victim was the son of the transportation minister. Whether the allegation is true or not, Yunus' prison stint becomes an unjust torment of beatings, forced confessions, and the slow-creeping madness of solitary confinement. (In one well-turned, poignant scene, he pleads with a fly not to abandon him.) This novel, the first in English by the Iranian-born Arian, is scaffolded with familiar tropes of kangaroo courts, false statements, and good-cop, bad-cop routines. But the author writes about Yunus' plight with a plainspoken, lacerating intensity. Moreover, Yunus is a richly imagined character who reckons with the consequences of his political ignorance and an ill-advised affair that's used as further ammunition against him. A few books and some bad judgment do not an enemy of the state make, but Arian expertly tracks Yunus' gears' turning from anger to depression to self-judging. Yunus' mental disorientation is as punishing as his beatings and, as the closing pages show, leaves lasting harm.
A distressing, smartly interior tale of the horrors sown by oppressive politics.
