In The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran, shortlisted for the 2026 International Booker Prize, the 1979 Islamic Revolution is the primary force propelling the story forward. However, the narrative is less concerned with major events or key figures of the revolution than with the lives irrevocably changed by it. This is the story of voices that, without the power of fiction, would have gone unheard.Review: The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar, translated by Ruth Martin (Scribe)The polyphonic (or multi-voiced) novel consists of four chapters and a prologue, following five members of one family after the revolution. Every chapter is separated from the next by a decade, while the prologue promises a free Iran, in an unknown – but not too distant – future. Wishing for the ‘real revolution’Behzad, a young communist teacher, and his two comrades, Sohrab and Peyman, are politically active in the early days after the revolution. They want to make the “real revolution” possible – “the people’s revolution in the institutions”. They each wish for a prosperous, independent country. However, understanding the differences between Peyman’s worldview and that of his comrades is essential to understanding the failed attempts at democracy and reforms in modern Iran. Peyman wishes for no photo of any individual to be put on the walls of a classroom again, after photographs of the shah are taken down. But Behzad and Sohrab look forward to a day when the pictures hung there depict Marx, Engels, Mao and Lenin: political figures alien to both the hearts and minds of a vast majority of Iranians. Peyman, an artist at heart who always carries his camera, seems more interested in life than in revolution. He became politicised, like many others, only after the 1979 revolution. Before that, he was not interested in politics, nor the books his two friends read, or the ideas they promoted in their flyers. A pragmatic realist, he thinks for people to stage the “real revolution”, all that matters is food, water and education. Behzad, an atheist who perceives the world like a zealous believer, values reading books on successful revolutions and engaging in insurgencies. Peyman talks about the importance of interacting with people to get to know the masses, while Behzad looks down at their unsophisticated and superstitious mentality, believing not only that he and his comrades already know the people, but that they are the people. Early in the book, Behzad observes about Peyman’s Islamist brother: Amin would probably agree with us when it comes to the use of weapons and violence but only in the service of a god he never believed in before.Behzad argues for the necessity of violence and armed struggle, failing to see there is no fundamental difference between violence committed in the name of god and violence committed in the name of the people. That violence has, first and foremost, always been used to serve illegitimate power. Incapable of hurting a fly, according to his family members, Behzad realises what the use of violence truly entails a decade later, living in exile in Germany – when he learns Peyman has been executed.His death – “a man who has understood something, but isn’t managing to convince everyone else” – is a tragedy. It’s also a metaphor for the death of rationality, in a land where the “believers” – regardless of their faith or ideology – resort to violence, or see it as the only solution. ‘Language is the only homeland’Behzad falls in love with one of his comrades, Nahid, during his political activities. He marries her before they are forced to go underground and flee the country into exile. There, in Germany, the story shifts to Nahid’s perspective. She is haunted by a stifling sense of loneliness as she struggles to learn the “cold language”, a reminder of what the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz said: “Language is the only homeland.” Cultural untranslatability lies behind Nahid’s melancholia and fits of crying. They prompt her daughter, Laleh, to say: “I really don’t want to know what it feels like to be Mama.” It is impossible to fully transit into a new culture without losing some aspects of the “self”; the same way a poem can never be fully translated without some nuances being lost. “I would love to know how the Germans see him. What they think of him,” Nahid thinks of how their German friends perceive her husband. “They would never print a poem of Hafez; they would never understand it even if it was translated.” She realises that a translated poem, exiled in a foreign language, mirrors her own exile in a foreign land. Nahid’s need to learn a new language and a new way of being prompts her to think of herself and her husband as children. They can’t categorise people anymore, only differentiate them – by thinking about who is friendly and who is not. An educated, intelligent woman, she feels helpless, fearing she might teach her daughter errors while helping her with her homework. A new generation of estrangementThe emotional gap caused by language and culture extends to the next generation. Nahid’s daughter, Laleh, narrates her 1999 trip to Iran with her mother, a journey made possible by the more open atmosphere that followed the election of a reformist president. She is loved and adored by her extended family. However, her feeling of estrangement is depicted in a scene when she wants to say “Your eyes see beautifully”, a phrase she has learnt recently – but thinks saying it would be wrong, that she would only be parroting it. Her life doesn’t feel as lonely as her mother’s, but it seems more complicated in certain ways. Nahid has a country where she is accepted and understood by its people. Laleh, on the other hand, experiences moments that make one wonder whether she feels fully at home in Germany either. She buys a magazine, and the seller wonders whether she can read the language; she thinks no one takes her father seriously when he speaks with all his grammatical mistakes; she worries someone could realise they are foreigners and set their car on fire while travelling. These are all moments of not belonging, in the one country she truly knows.Inconsistencies and sharp proseThere are occasions in the novel that a reader familiar with Iran may find historically and culturally inaccurate. Laleh’s cousin, Ava, talks about a student having her fingernails pulled out at school for wearing nail polish. This form of torture could be believable for a political prisoner in the early stages of the revolution, but reads as highly exaggerated here. Laleh describes premarital sex as a secret that carries the death penalty, but capital punishment is only used for adultery and rape. The scene where Nima tries to approach Laleh’s table in a cafe by subtly dragging his chair along — since he is worried about people’s reactions to him sitting with a girl — only to buy her a milkshake a minute later and sit back at her table without any worry, is not fully convincing either. However, these minor inconsistencies do not render the novel less compelling. Author Toni Morrison wrote about the absence of interior life from historical accounts, and how, through the act of writing and re-imagining in fiction – what she called “literary archaeology” – the author can reconstruct the past and revive the voices of those silenced by forces beyond their power and control. This is what Bazyar’s sharp prose skilfully achieves in The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran.Hossein Asgari does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.