The book opens in 1926 with the author’s mother, a six-month-old infant, being carried on horseback across the Aras River as her family fled Soviet forces in northern Azerbaijan. The narrator himself was born in 1961, the son of a father serving a commuted death sentence.
City England London, Date 4/24/2026 As a fragile regional ceasefire approaches its 22 April expiry and the Strait of Hormuz remains contested, a new memoir has been released that offers readers something the news cycle cannot: a lived, first-person account of how Iran became the country the world is watching today. A Glimpse of Iran, written under the pen name Mazdak Z. and published on 12 December 2025, traces six decades of Iranian history through the ordinary life of one family.
The book opens in 1926 with the author’s mother, a six-month-old infant, being carried on horseback across the Aras River as her family fled Soviet forces in northern Azerbaijan. It closes in present-day Europe, where the author has lived since leaving Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. In between, the narrator is born in 1961 to a father serving a commuted death sentence, witnesses the 1979 revolution as an 18-year-old student, survives the Islamic Republic’s early crackdowns, and eventually leaves his country without a passport.
The timing is not incidental. “I wrote this story to share with the world what it means to grow up in an Iranian family,” the author writes in the book’s dedication, “how our lives could be turbulent and yet strangely ordinary all at once.” With Iran once again at the centre of an international crisis, the memoir arrives as a reminder that the country’s present has a long prehistory, one rarely told from the inside.
Across 35 chapters, the narrative moves through events that shaped modern Iran: the 1941 Allied occupation and the arrest of Reza Shah; the 1953 CIA and MI6-backed coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, which the author’s father, a Tudeh Party officer, narrowly survived; the White Revolution and the oil boom of the 1970s; the return of Ayatollah Khomeini in February 1979; and the eight-year war with Iraq. The political backdrop is consistently filtered through domestic scenes — a mother cooling off in a tiled courtyard basin in Ahvaz, a father released from prison after more than 6 years, a university shut down during the Cultural Revolution.
The author, who writes under the name Mazdak Z., is based in France and has asked that his biographical details remain private. The pen name is drawn from a pre-Islamic Persian prophet, chosen by the author’s father in the 1960s as a deliberate break from the Arabic and Muslim names common in Iran at the time. “It is my first book, and I am far from a professional writer,” the author notes. “But it is written with honesty, warmth and the wish to connect.”
The memoir sits in a growing category of diaspora writing that has gained renewed attention since the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests and the broader regional conflict that began in 2024. Unlike academic histories or journalistic dispatches, A Glimpse of Iran is structured as a personal chronicle, closer in register to Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis or Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, though without the graphic or academic frames of either.
About the Book A Glimpse of Iran is a literary memoir that blends family history, political chronicle and personal reflection. It covers the period from 1926 to the present and is told in 35 chapters. The book is available in three formats and can be ordered through major online retailers and by special request through independent bookshops.
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