The Golden Cage

Shirin Ebadi’s second book makes it especially noteworthy on two counts: firstly, it is about Iran which has never been away from the news even amidst an ongoing Arab spring; and secondly, it is authored by the first Muslim woman Nobel Laureate, who has become an expatriate. But it is definitely a very sad book with existential contours which is about a family where three brothers growing up together assume three exclusive and antagonistic pathways and eventually suffer a similar tragic fate. Their sorrows and predicaments are forborne by Simin, their mother, and Pari, their educated, dynamic sister. The mother eventually passes away amidst harrowing grief whereas the foreign educated, yet by now severely depressed, Pari ends away in London, thus ending the saga of a whole generation that experienced the closing years of the Shah and then the legacy of a revolutionary regime.