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Sanam Mahloudji

Biography

Sanam Mahloudji

Sanam Mahloudji was born in Tehran and left during the Islamic Revolution. She is the recipient of the Pushcart Prize and was nominated for a PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Idaho Review, The Kenyon Review and elsewhere. Mahloudji was raised in Los Angeles and now lives in London with her husband and two children. THE PERSIANS is her debut novel.

Sanam Mahloudji

Books by Sanam Mahloudji

by Sanam Mahloudji - Fiction

Meet the Valiat family. In Iran, they were somebodies. In America, they’re nobodies. First there is Elizabeth, the regal matriarch, who remained in Tehran despite the revolution. She lives alone but is sometimes visited by Niaz, her Islamic-law-breaking granddaughter, who takes her partying with a side of purpose and yet manages to survive. Elizabeth’s daughters wound up in America: Shirin, a charismatic and flamboyantly high-flying event planner in Houston, and Seema, a dreamy idealist turned housewife languishing in the chaparral-filled hills of Los Angeles. And then there’s the other granddaughter, Bita, a disillusioned law student in New York City trying to find deeper meaning by quietly giving away her belongings. When an annual vacation in Aspen goes wildly awry and Shirin ends up in jail, the family’s upper-class veneer is cracked open.