Sounds

Have you heard that Persian culture is poetic? Sounds lets you live inside it, through memory, love, emigration, and the fragile moments that keep a life from disappearing.

On the surface, it is the story of a love barely spoken aloud in Tehran between 2008 and 2012, and of the life later carried abroad. Beneath that, quietly, its truest subject is the narrator's fear: not of heartbreak, but of being lost, erased, and forgotten.

The novel unfolds through two video calls during the Covid years, opening into memories of student life, friendship, longing, and the everyday world of an ordinary Iranian home. The political and historical upheavals of those years stay mostly at the edges; what matters here are the fragile private moments that would vanish inside the noise of larger events if no one gathered them.

Rather than describe itself directly, the book begins like this:

"Here, nothing happens. Nothing will be fixed, nothing torn down. No interpretation is coming. No conclusion. This is the loose end of a thread of words that were once sounds..."

Written in a lyrical, layered voice and accompanied by the author's own acrylic paintings, Sounds lets narration and image move alongside each other, leaving open the question of which came first: the picture, the memory, or the story.