Shida Bazyar’s 2016 debut novel Nachts ist es leise in Teheran has recently appeared in Ruth Martin’s evocative English translation as The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran, published by Scribe. Bazyar, the daughter of Iranian political activists who fled the Islamic Republic in 1987, has received several awards for the book, including the Blogger Literary Award and the Uwe Johnson Prize, and dedicated it to her parents. The novel follows an Iranian family whose central figures, Behzad and Nahid—both communist revolutionaries—escape persecution in Iran by fleeing to West Germany. Bazyar’s own political background permeates her fiction: her second novel, Drei Kameradinnen (2021), longlisted for the German Book Prize and later translated by Martin as Sisters in Arms (2023), addresses the rise of fascism and racism in contemporary Germany. Topical in light of the current political situation in Iran, The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran captures the charged atmosphere of its setting—echoed in the words of Behzad, one of the main characters: “We’re in the middle of the revolution; even farting is political” (32). This moment of comic relief breaks the novel’s otherwise serious tone.
Structured into four chapters and an epilogue, each section is named after both a year and a central character. The narrative of The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran opens in 1979 (the year of the establishment of the Islamic Regime in Iran) with Behzad—a communist revolutionary who takes part in protests first against the Shah and then against the mullahs—falling in love with a fellow revolutionary, Nahid. The second chapter jumps to 1989. Nahid, now married to Behzad and mother to two children, Laleh and Morad, lives in West Germany with her family. She recounts how they were forced to flee Iran after Behzad’s close friend and comrade appeared on an arrest list, knowing that Behzad’s name would inevitably follow. Struggling with depression brought on by exile, Nahid tries to conceal her despair from her German friends, Walter and Ulla. The third chapter, set in 1999, follows Laleh, who was four years old when her parents fled Iran, and is now a teenager in Germany. Conscientious and high-achieving, she ensures her parents never have to attend parent–teacher meetings, aware that her teachers find communication difficult due to her parents’ limited German. That year, she travels to Iran for the first time since their flight, accompanied by her mother and younger sister, Tara, who was born in Germany; Behzad chooses not to join them. Morad—known as Mo—takes center stage in the fourth chapter, set in 2009. Sharing a flat with his friend Tobi, Mo knows little about the Islamic Revolution and resorts to Googling it when a student protest at his university coincides with the Green Movement in Iran and its media coverage. The novel concludes with a four-page epilogue narrated by Tara, the youngest sibling, a queer feminist activist. On holiday in Sweden with Laleh’s daughter, Parastou, she spends time without internet until they stop at a petrol station and discover uplifting news about Iran in a newspaper.
The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran fits the family novel mold in many ways: it spans generations, explores inherited trauma, and depicts the effects of politics on a family. Yet unlike most family novels, where politics serves as a backdrop and is gradually revealed as the story unfolds, here the reader is plunged directly into the political events from the outset. The novel opens with the youthful revolutionary excitement of one generation, but their lives become radically dull and depressing after their flight from Iran. Behzad, who never sets foot in Iran again, continues to live there vicariously through the radio and later TV. Laleh sees her mother, Nahid, smiling genuinely only once—during their first trip back to Iran after years in exile. Nahid adjusts her TV time according to Behzad’s news time from Iran; the children instinctively fall silent while he listens. She waits anxiously for letters from Iran and stops reading books, believing that “they might have lost their power somewhere between Tehran, Istanbul, East Berlin, and here” (Bazyar, p. 99). From protesting on the streets of Tehran to Behzad’s electrician apprenticeship in Germany and Nahid’s discovery that Chinese grocers sell fresh coriander, the parents their children know now bear little resemblance to the young revolutionaries they once were. When Ava, Laleh’s cousin, asks her to describe her father, Behzad, Ava’s image of him doesn’t quite match how Laleh knows him to be:
Tell me something about your father, was the other thing Ava asked last night. He must be a very brave man, right? she asked, because that’s what she had heard from her parents and everyone else here. Yes, I said, probably. And he has a very big heart, right? she went on, probing further, and I considered saying that he never swats the flies away from his foot when they land there. When the woman next door complains because Mo’s music is too loud or because Tara is skipping in her room, Papa isn’t all that brave. Then he stands in the doorway and says, Yes, you’re right, we’re too loud. He never says you’re right otherwise, neither to people nor to arguments. He doesn’t even let his own arguments stand, because of course you always have to bring in several different perspectives, several truths. When Papa explains something, it’s always as nuanced and neutral as it could possibly be. This gets on Mo’s nerves whenever he needs Papa to help him with his homework, because obviously it takes longer than someone just telling you their opinion. Mo doesn’t find it brave or big-hearted. (160)
Behzad and Nahid gradually diminish over the course of the novel—especially Behzad, who transforms from a confident, high-spirited young man full of faith in the revolution into a guilt-ridden figure struggling to come to terms with the news of thousands of political prisoners executed without trial, including someone very close to him. While Nahid struggles with her German in Germany, Laleh struggles with her Farsi in Iran. She visits Iran during the reformist era under President Khatami and is struck by how women embrace fashion, the bustling beauty salons, and the fresh fruits, so much so that she no longer wants to eat peaches in Germany. Over her 25-day stay, Laleh begins to adopt the local customs, sitting on the floor and chatting casually for hours. She also feels a deep sense of guilt when she meets Nima, her father’s friend’s son, who, despite enduring great suffering under the regime, still embodies the revolutionary spirit.
In the novel, the younger generation seems increasingly distant from Iranian politics—not out of indifference, but because the parents’ forced flight to Germany changes the family’s dynamics. The challenges the parents face in exile bear little resemblance to those they once confronted in Iran. To their children, they appear less like the revolutionaries of the past and more like helpless figures adrift in a foreign country. In some cases, as with Laleh, the roles are reversed, with the child guiding the parents through a country whose language they can barely speak. Mo’s case, however, shows an actual transformation. At first, he is detached from Iran, uninvolved in its politics yet bitter and judgmental—critical both of the student activism at his German university and of Laleh, whom he sees as embracing an Iranian identity she never truly lived. The constant “Where are you from?” from white Germans annoys him, though he struggles to articulate why. His perspective shifts after befriending Maryam, a politically active Egyptian-German student, which sparks his interest in Iranian politics; he begins reading about the Islamic regime and the Green Movement. By the chapter’s end, he joins his younger sister, Tara, at a protest organized by Iranians in exile—a gesture that marks his growing engagement with the situation in Iran.
The brief three-page epilogue focuses on Tara, Behzad and Nahid’s third child, born in Germany, who grows up to be a queer feminist activist. We also learn about her in Mo’s chapter, where she resembles Behzad and Nahid in their youth. Mo remarks, “Because Tara is always better informed, because Tara talks to our parents more openly and at greater length on the phone” (p. 249). Tara also attends protests with her parents. There is no bitterness between the parents and their children’s generation; rather, it is circumstances that have created this distance. The younger generation—especially Laleh and Mo—are not angry with their parents; instead, there seems to be an unspoken understanding between them. Tara, however, serves as a reminder of their parents’ youth, embodying their—especially Behzad’s—revolutionary spirit. Through her, Bazyar imagines a time that has, unfortunately, not yet come for the people of Iran and for all those forced into exile.
In recent years, many postmigrant family novels have appeared in the German-language literary scene—such as Vatermal by Necati Öziri (2023), Dschinns by Fatma Aydemir (2022), and Nimm die Alpen weg by Ralph Tharayil (2023). These novels often center on the younger, postmigrant generation whose families came to Germany or Switzerland seeking better work opportunities and a good life for their children, portraying the younger generation’s struggles with xenophobia, questions of belonging, identity crises, and tensions with the older generation. Bazyar’s novel also explores this generational distance, but here the divide is not due to simple misunderstanding; rather, it is rooted in the trauma of a revolution that initially succeeded but was ultimately hijacked by the Islamic regime—and its aftermath reverberates through the family across generations, ending in a hopeful fantasy of eventual victory. The novel follows two protagonists’ political escape from Iran to West Germany, the events leading up to their flight, and the younger generation’s ongoing confrontation with this complex legacy—a legacy that remains largely unknown and unspoken. The younger generation knows little about their parents’ lives in Iran because the older generation—who age through the course of the novel—are deeply traumatized by these events. From Germany, they do everything they can to raise awareness about the plight of those who could not leave, though their efforts are often limited to gathering signatures and appealing to the UN. Meanwhile, they also try to raise their children with a sense of normalcy, but the children still notice the sadness and melancholy of their parents, even if they don’t fully understand the reasons behind it.
This highly political and touching novel gives a great insight into the political situation in Iran from the fall of the Shah regime through to 2016—six years before the custodial death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman. Her death sparked massive protests across Iran and around the world under the slogan, “Women, Life, Freedom” (Jin, Jiyan, Azadi). At the time, Bazyar posted a photo on Instagram of the novel’s table of contents, where she had handwritten “2022 Jin, Jiyan, Azadî” between the printed chapter titles. In the caption accompanying the post, Bazyar wrote:
How much power one has as an author. You have omnipotence over what happens to your own characters. I’ve so often answered the question about the epilogue in “Nights are quiet in Tehran” by saying that it felt so good to give my characters a hopeful ending.
It’s now been over ten years since I started writing the novel, and recently I’ve been imagining continuing it. How would Behzad experience these days, how would Nahid? It would be a boring continuation, because the story is taking place on the streets of Iran, not here, in exile. So I’m not imagining this writing out of literary interest, but only to retain this omnipotence over events. I would end the killing. I would free the imprisoned. I would punish the murderers (again and again and again). I would write the most dazzling celebration of a revolution. I would put Nahid and Behsad on a plane. I would make them dance, to new songs, on old soil.
The power is not mine. But it is there. It stands on the streets of Iran and raises its fists to the sky. It wants change, and it will bring it. Because at night it is never quiet in Tehran—and right now it is especially not (nowhere).
In translating this vision of authorial omnipotence—of an imagined freedom—Ruth Martin brings Shida Bazyar’s politically urgent and thematically significant voice to English-speaking readers. Her translation effectively preserves the power of the Farsi slogans, seamlessly incorporating their meanings into the narrative, creating an experience that feels both immediate and compelling. It maintains the tonal shifts between generations, capturing with meticulous precision the revolutionary generation’s initial fervor, their subsequent despair and helplessness, and the younger generation’s confusion, angst, and restless energy.
Bazyar, Shida. The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran. Translated by Ruth Martin. Scribe Publications, 2025.
Ankita Harbola is a PhD candidate in German Studies at Rutgers University (USA), specializing in contemporary German literature. Her dissertation explores the phenomenon of post-flight writing in the works of Senthuran Varatharajah, Karosh Taha, and Abdulrahman Alqalaq.