My Father’s Notebook Big Sale

When he was a boy, Aga Akbar, the illegitimate, deaf son of a Persian nobleman, travelled with his uncle to a cave on nearby Saffron Mountain. Once there, he was to transcribe a cuneiform inscription over three thousand years old. Decades later, his son, Ishmael – a political dissident in exile – attempts to translate a notebook filled with a private language made from this ancient script . . . and in the process tells his father’s story, his own, and the story of twentieth-century Iran. My Father’s Notebook is at once a masterful chronicle of a culture’s troubled voyage into modernity and the heart-rending, timeless tale of a son’s enduring love.

Kader Abdolah (a pen name created in memoriam to friends who diedunder persecution by the current Iranian regime) was born in Iran in1954. While a student of physics in Tehran, he joined a secret leftistparty that fought against the dictatorship of the shah and thesubsequent dictatorship of the ayatollahs. Abdolah wrote for an illegaljournal and clandestinely published two books in Iran. In 1988, hearrived in the Netherlands as a political refugee. Kader Abdolah is theauthor of several books, including the novels My Father’s Notebook, The House of the Mosque and most recently The Kingwhich has been longlisted for the 2016 International DUBLIN LiteraryAward. He has received several awards, including the Chevalier dansl’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres decoration in 2008.