The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen
Shokoofeh Azar
(Author)
Description
From International Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist Shokoofeh Azar, comes a stylistically audacious and emotionally powerful novel about one large, complicated family and a love affair lasting decades.
★ "A wildly ambitious novel about Iran's past, present, and future filled with longing and fury."--Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
Spanning fifty years in the history of modern Iran, this lush, layered story embraces politics and family, revolution and reconstruction, loss and love as it recounts the colorful destinies of twelve children who get lost one long-ago night inside a mysterious palace.
Azar's first novel, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree (Europa Editions, 2020), was shortlisted for the Stella Prize for Fiction and the International Booker Prize; it was longlisted for the PEN America Award and the National Book Award for Translated Literature.
In Azar's new novel, each lost child's story unfolds against the backdrop of immense cultural and political transformation; lovers must survive war, revolution, and rigid social strictures to keep their love alive; family bonds are tested, especially those indissoluble connections between the living and the dead. The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen is also the moving story of one family's efforts to preserve the richness of Iranian culture in the face of Islamic hegemony following the 1979 revolution.
Product Details
| Publisher | Europa Editions |
| Publish Date | June 10, 2025 |
| Pages | 528 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Hardback |
| EAN/UPC | 9798889660972 |
| Dimensions | 9.1 X 6.0 X 1.7 inches | 1.6 pounds |
About the Author
Born in Iran in 1972, Shokoofeh Azar was the first Iranian woman to hitchhike the entire length of the Silk Road. She worked as a newspaper editor and journalist in Iran, covering issues relating to women's rights. After several arrests in connection with her work as a journalist, on advice from her family, she fled Iran in 2010, and was granted asylum in Australia, where she has lived as a political refugee since 2011. She is the author of essays, articles, and children's books. Her first novel, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, was shortlisted for the Stella Prize for Fiction and the International Booker Prize, and was a finalist for the PEN America Award and the National Book Award for Translated Literature. Her new novel, The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen, has already received two awards for a manuscript-in-progress, one from The Australian Council for the Arts and the other from Victoria Creative.
Reviews
★ "A wildly ambitious novel about Iran's past, present, and future filled with longing and fury."--Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
Praise for The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree
★ "Azar's narrative exudes fairy tale charm driven by moments of deep connection that ultimately celebrate human and humane bonds unbroken even in death."--Booklist
"Engaging, tantalizing, and memorable."--Foreword Reviews
"If ever there was a book that needs to be read more than once, this is it."--ArtsHub
"One of those miraculous books that not only has the power to send an arrow into your heart, it also makes you think."--Qantara
"Shokoofeh Azar has found a brilliant way to use myth to record harsh truths about political and cultural upheaval."--BookRiot
"[Azar's] book is a great journey. It moves places and it moves us as readers, in an emotional and intellectual sense."--Robert Wood, The Los Angeles Review of Books
"The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree is a hugely ambitious book, blending familial drama with the history of a nation during a conflicted era."--Words Without Borders
"Azar's novel is sad, funny, poetic, moving and poignant all at once, a novel I would recommend without any reservations at all."--Asian Review of Books
"A book full of hope and human resilience in the face of unspeakable cruelty and intolerance"--World Literature Today
"The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree is both a simple family story and a complex look at the nature of reality and imagination."--The Winnipeg Free Press
"[The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree] affirms again the adaptability, the veracity, the sheer power of the novel form." --The Brooklyn Rail
"The plot is intricate...the writing is ravishing: shimmeringly poetic...so mesmerizing is the storytelling."--Miriam Cosic, The Weekend Australian
"Azar delves deep into the mythological spirit realm and pre-Islamic Zoroastrian religion of ancient Persia . . . [taking] us into breathtaking worlds of imagination and allegory . . . Astonishing."--Backstory
"I have never read such a voice before. It is playful, poetic and deeply melancholy at the same time. Azar writes about the blunt force or Iranian history with the lightness of a feather's touch. Transcendental, brilliant and beautiful."--Alice Pung, author of Laurinda
"Combing characters loosely drawn from her own life with a mélange of supernatural elements, Azar achieves a certain magical realist style that is rich without being baroque, amply lush without being weighed down by access."--Asymptote Journal
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