Praise for Caspian Rain

"This novel is nothing less than a literary sensation, not only because it revives Iran's past in a heavenly precise prose, but also since we will all too soon desperately look for books which explain this country. To truly understand Iran, you have to read this novel."

— Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

"Entrancing...Caspian Rain is a beautiful study in disappointment and ineffable loss, in the conflict between duty and desire. Nahai shows her characters just as they are, damaged. They are keenly aware of how they'd like to change their lives – and of how limited their options really are."

— Los Angeles Times

"Nahai evokes even peripheral characters in vivid detail: the daughter of Argentine exiles (and suspected Nazis) blares tango music from her window and shows up at her parents’ funeral with a hot-pink flower behind her ear; a former student activist, broken under torture by the secret police, scavenges for dead women’s hair…"

— New Yorker

"A glimpse into a largely alien culture. Nahai tells [the] story with elegance and insight."

— New York Times Book Review

"Nahai’s power as a story-teller flows from her desire to weave the brutal facts of modern Iranian history with fantastic narratives of familial rupture and political displacement. American readers will be absorbed by [her] colorful evocation of the characters. From her clear-eyed yet deeply emphatic perch in the New World, Nahai sounds the emotional costs of exile as she explores the trauma of loss for her fellow émigrés. She is, after all, that subculture’s finest chronicler."

— Chicago Tribune

"...beautiful and haunting...Nahai's narrative skill and linguistic talent shine"

— San Francisco Chronicle

"Heartbreakingly captivating, Nahai’s novel nonetheless evokes hope...darkly enticing...Set in pre-revolution Iran, this somber, beautifully written novel is a look into the unfulfilled lives of a hugely dysfunctional Iranian Jewish family and a far-reaching story of the ever-persevering human spirit…Nahai's writing is poetic, with provocative turns of phrase over which to pause..."

— Miami Herald

"Nahai deftly creates the smells and daily routines of an old Tehran neighborhood...[and] a colorful cast of quirky characters."

— Washington Post

"Caspian Rain guides readers deep into the inner sanctum of one painfully divided family in the years leading up to Iran's Islamic Revolution...Nahai has you hooked from start to finish...Her unusual yet effective narrative flow portrays this world in a way that leaves behind the typical 'veils and misogyny' stereotypes most Americans know from contemporary Iran. And yet, Nahai's story gives colorful narrative to the cultural forces at play in the years leading up to the arrival of Islamic fundamentalism in this most misunderstood country…an uncommonly poignant tale. Caspian Rain is an English major's book—even the smallest aside reinforces the book’s overarching themes of loss and exile. Each detail, each character Nahai conceives is, as Yaas notes, 'Tragic to the core, but also mesmerizing.' "

— Chicago Sun-Times

"Readers are allowed a singular look into the world of Iranian Jews and their hierarchy...This lyrical and literary novel is beautifully written."

— USA Today

"Vivid and accurate...In Caspian Rain Gina B. Nahai demonstrates that suffering is a cultural imprint...Perhaps Nahai’s intention is best illuminated by the naming of her characters. In Persian, Omid means Hope, Bahar means spring or renewal, and Yaas means Poet’s Jasmine. But Yaas also means sorrow. It is our job to understand the relationship of the three, and to unravel the web they’ve woven around loss."

— San Jose Mercury News and Contra Costa Times

"This tender story, set during the shah’s rule before the Iranian revolution, has the inevitability of Greek tragedy...[Nahai] offers readers a striking recollection of the sounds, smells and landscapes of her native land. This is a beautifully written picture of a culture caught between the modern West and ancient Islam."

— Providence Journal

"Like drops of acid, Gina Nahai’s words burn the pages of this moving novel about the fate of women in pre-revolutionary Iran. Nahai’s alluring poetic style draws us into the lives of her female characters. We identify with their hopes and desires, but we also sense their frustration. Beneath the novel’s calm and captivating prose is a powerful testament to Iranian women’s fight against oppression."

— Ms. Magazine

"...beautifully rendered, with passages that urge rereading...Nahai is a born storyteller. Her novel resonates with an almost audible vibration, as though she had curled up next to you on a rainy evening and begun to spin her tale."

— Portland Tribune

"Spirit, a mystical tone, sharp social analysis and telling detail inform Caspian Rain, Gina Nahai's fine novel about Iran in the '70s, before mullah rule replaced the monarchy of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in the Islamic Revolution...vivid...singularly poignant."

— Fort Worth Star-Telegram

"Nahai's compelling novel depicts one family's tale of alienation and loss...a vivid study of a broken home."

— Entertainment Weekly

"The interlocking tales read like myths; Nahai’s writing is compassionate even as it indicts."

— Los Angeles Magazine

"Gina B. Nahai's beguiling fourth novel Caspian Rain provides a fascinating glimpse into the lives of a lost world — those of Jewish-Iranians living under the Shah...[it] sheds light on the hypocrisies, emotional deprivations and inter-class tensions within the city's Jewish community. Nahai's group portrait is rich, complex and unsparing, rendered with a highly professional prose style."

— Tennessean

"A story that blooms into full imaginative flower...In an indication of Nahai's talent and powers of invention, she invests her narrative with a strong tragic inevitability...vivid and credible cast of characters, and a visual sense of Tehran and Iranian society as experienced by Jews living under what was, for them, the liberal policies of the Shah."

— South Florida Sun-Sentinel

"[Nahai] focuses on one family, humanizing a people and a place that, these days, are more often associated with uranium-enrichment programs and sponsorship of terrorism...she’s deft at painting a bleak picture that we want to look at—not as a morbid curiosity but as thoughtful, often heartbreaking art."

— Paste Magazine

"Caspian Rain is a thrill to read. Heartbreak and hope fill the pages. Nahai delves deep into fear, love, jealousy, and obsession—and with evocative language, and a rich and complex story, takes us to another culture."

— The Brooklyn Rail

"...beautifully written, absorbing and moving...magical...[Nahai] does a beautiful job of ushering us through an Iran most of us don't know – of colors and scents, of mountains and beaches, of slums and mansions...the poetry and the emotional quality of Nahai's writing will linger long after the book is closed."

— Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

"Gina Nahai’s powerful storytelling voice illuminates an intriguing foreign culture and blasts our preconceived views of Iranian Jewish émigrés. Nahai, a gifted and poetic writer, deserves a wide readership both for her ability to humanize a country many Americans perceive as hostile and extreme and for the light she sheds on Iranian Jewish history and culture."

— San Diego Jewish Journal

"Remarkable...Caspian Rain offers a troublingly beautiful portrait of an array of characters as families disintegrate and dreams go awry. There is so much empathy in a book laced with cruelty and so many inventive flights of fancy in a novel deep in traps made of false hope. This is a smartly executed story of longing and emptiness and of both cacophony and silence."

— Jewish Book World

"...lovely and graceful...Nahai's writing is poetic and original, sometimes stark and sometimes transcendent...Poetic and original"

— BookReporter.com

"Yaas recounts the story of her family’s unraveling against a rich cast of secondary characters...Caspian Rain is a moving mother-daughter story with a wealth of interesting characters."

— The Feminist Review

"[Told] in a unique, rhythmic voice that’s equal parts hope and cynicism...Caspian Rain gracefully depicts the dynamics of a divided family by taking us through the diverse spheres and structures of Iranian society not often glimpsed in English literature."

— Venus Zine

"Caspian Rain is a beautifully written book about the constraints of living in a Middle-Eastern culture. Focusing on the lives of two Jewish women living in Iran during the rule of the Shah, it is an intimate portrait of hope betrayed, lost, and regained...[a] poignant story."

— Curledup.com

"Caspian Rain is a fascinating, tragic coming-of-age story...Some beautiful writing and a compelling story...A rare glimpse into one family’s inner sanctum prior to Iran’s Islamic Revolution."

— Bookmarks Magazine

"...a beautifully written inside view of Jewish-Iranian culture...Gina B. Nahai captivates with this tale of Iranian despondency the same way Isabel Allende opens the confusion and horrors of Central and South America."

— PopSyndicate.com

"Nahai’s prose is at once elegant and tinged with melancholy...An enlightening glimpse into an unfamiliar culture and society. While the societal constraints—especially against women—might be a little difficult for some to relate to, the family divided, sadly, is a theme that is universal."

— Laist.com

"Riveting family drama and compelling historical fiction…The multiple ways Jews and Muslims intersect is also clearly presented, offering a fascinating glimpse into Persian life prior to the 1979 insurgency. Richly detailed, emotionally intense, and tremendously moving, this work is highly recommended."

— Library Journal (starred review)

"Nahai’s story of a haunted Jewish family in Tehran during the shah’s last years possesses the dark beauty and harsh lessons of a fairy tale…Nahai’s poetic and cathartic drama speaks for all silenced women, for all who are tyrannized."

— Booklist (starred review)

"In her stirring fourth novel, Nahai explores the struggles of an Iranian family in the tenuous decade before the Islamic revolution…a poignant tale of a damaged family."

— Publisher's Weekly

"Nahai’s alluring poetic style draws us into the lives of her female characters…captivating prose…a powerful testament to Iranian women’s fight against oppression."

— Ms. Magazine

"Filled with hope and despair, Caspian Rain is Nahai’s most emotional and inspiring novel yet. Nahai’s heroine — the inspired and inspiring Yaas — learns the lessons of obedience, subservience, and forbearance, and then chooses a surprising and unexpected path."

— Lisa See, author of Peony in Love and Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

"Unexpected and heartrending, but also witty, elegiac, sophisticated and edgy. Caspian Rain is a beautiful book."

— Chris Abani, author of Graceland and The Virgin of Flames

"In Caspian Rain, Gina Nahai writes with subtlety and grace about the unappeasable forces of culture, class and family which shape the life of a young girl growing up in Jewish Tehran before the mullahs."

— Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander and Paint it Black

"With her fourth novel, Gina B. Nahai establishes herself among the top rank of writers of her generation. In Caspian Rain, she brings to stunning life a cast of characters that continues to haunt the reader."

— John Rechy, author of City of Night

"Caspian Rain once more proves Gina B. Nahai’s ability to create through her wonderfully lyrical prose a fictional world that, while rooted in a particular culture and history, is universally relevant and appealing."

— Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran

"In exquisite, poetic vignettes, Caspian Rain tells the intense story of a mother and daughter in search of approval within upper-class Iranian social circles. Ultimately though, what they struggle towards is acceptance from one another. Nahai’s writing is a graceful balancing act between the lush and the stark. Her gorgeous sentences cut to the bone."

— Christina Garcia, author of Monkey Hunting and Dreaming in Cuban

"Gina Nahai’s beautifully written novel Caspian Rain is evocative and poetic, with striking images that remain in the mind long after they are read. It is also a heart-wrenching examination of the tragedies of women caught in the net of gender, history, family secrets and the unbending laws of high society. But ultimately it is a celebration of the human spirit — the moments of joy and courage and risk-taking that make all our lives worth living."

— Chitra Divakaruni, author of Mistress of Spices and Queen of Dreams

"Lovers of the art of storytelling should know Gina B. Nahai. Much more than a fascinating, page-turning glimpse into the tribes and classes of Iran, Caspian Rain is an exquisite novel which, like a Ghost Boy on a bicycle, will continue to magically haunt its readers long after its ending."

— Sandra Tsing Loh, author of Depth Takes a Holiday and A Year in Van Nuys

"Gina Nahai, a gifted storyteller with a unique and powerful voice, invites us into a strange, unsettling but ultimately beguiling world, a place of both pain and enchantment. Remarkably, she allows to glimpse the hard realities of life in contemporary Iran in a new and unaccustomed light while, at the same time, she shows us that the innermost truths of the human heart are truly universal. Caspian Rain is both timely and timeless, an important book that comes at just the right time."

— Jonathan Kirsch, author of A History of the End of the World

"In Caspian Rain, Gina Nahai takes us on a privileged journey into an Iran a contemporary traveler can only hope to know through fiction — an Iran before the Islamic Revolution where women could aspire to independence and dream of larger lives. Through the eyes of her 12-year-old heroine, we see a whole society mirrored, a society enmeshed in superstition but struggling to emerge into modernity. A heroine — and a book — to embrace. I was mesmerized."

— Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey, author of A Woman of Independent Means

"If writers do indeed write what they know, then Gina Nahai has a PhD in the human heart. Her characters inhabit their culture and their time so profoundly that her readers do too; from moments of magical realism to years of anxious drifting and struggling, Nahai’s characters are as much in search of themselves as the turbulent nation they live in."

— Patt Morrison, author of Rio L.A., Tales from the Los Angeles River

"The writing in Caspian Rain is so lyrical and flowing that you almost forget just how hard life can be for someone who is doomed to forever be an outsider. Bahar, who marries above her station, finds that she is isolated from both the family and society she marries into and the family and friends she left behind...Nahai has written a novel that illuminates a complex society while offering up a very specific and moving story of one woman's desire to maintain her dignity and tenuous standing within that diffident society."

— Laura Hansen, Bookin’ It (Little Falls, MN)

Caspian Rain

In the decade before the Islamic Revolution, Iran is a country at the brink of explosion. Twelve-year-old Yaas is born into an already divided family: Her father is the son of wealthy Iranian Jews who are integrated into the country’s upper-class, mostly Muslim, elite; her mother was raised in the slums of South Tehran, one street away from the old Jewish ghetto.

Yaas spends her childhood navigating the many layers of Iranian society. Her task, already difficult, becomes all the more critical when her father falls in love with a beautiful woman from a noble Muslim family. As her parents’ marriage begins to crumble and the country moves ever closer to revolution, Yaas is plagued by a terrifying genetic illness that is slowly robbing her of her hearing. Facing the prospect of complete deafness, Yaas learns that her father is about to abandon her and her mother, and so she undertakes a desperate, last-ditch effort to save herself and her family.

At once a cultural exploration of an as-yet unfamiliar society, and a psychological study of the effects of loss, Caspian Rain takes the reader inside the tragic and fascinating world of a brave young girl struggling against impossible odds.

Read an Excerpt >>

A Word from Gina Nahai >>

Original publisher: MacAdam/Cage, 2007
ISBN-10: 1596923148
ISBN-13: 978-1596923140