Missing Soluch

Mahmoud Dowlatabadi · b. 1940 · Iran

Originally Ja-ye Khali-ye Soluch (Persian) · translated by Kamran Rastegar

Why it matters

A woman wakes to find her husband has vanished overnight, left to raise three children alone in a droughted Khorasan village amid a community's casual cruelty. Rural Iran rendered with an epic, unsentimental density.

At a glance

Dense, unhurried village realism accumulates deprivation in exhaustive detail with little narrative relief.