House of the Edrisis

"Like all revolutions, this one too has led to a regime more despotic than the one it replaced." So observes an omniscient narrator in Ghazaleh Alizadeh's monumental novel The House of the Edrisis, offering a darkly comedic glimpse at the aftermath of an unnamed twentieth-century uprising. In this concluding volume, the revolutionary tumult that has consumed the aristocratic Edrisi family and their opulent mansion shows no signs of abating. As a ragtag band of squatters-turned-rulers consolidates power through surveillance and intimidation, the novel's eccentric cast of characters is forced to reckon with upended social orders. Erstwhile revolutionaries become complicit enforcers of a new authoritarian regime, their lofty slogans of liberation curdling into doublespeak. At the center of this story stands the ancestral Edrisi manor-a fading palace that seems to contain multitudes. Its once-vibrant gardens and courtyards, rendered in lush descriptive passages, now serve as haunted stages for madness, romance, violence, and philosophical reflection in turn. Lauded as a crowning achievement of modern Persian literature, this first-ever English translation of The House of the Edrisis in two volumes offers an unforgettable immersion in one writer's vision of the perils and pathos of a world remade by revolution.