An critically-acclaimed Iranian author makes his American literary debut with this powerful and harrowing psychological portrait of modern Iranāan unprecedented and urgent work of fiction with echoes of The Stranger, 1984, and The Orphan Masterās Sonāthat exposes the oppressive and corrosive power of the state to bend individual lives.
Yunus Turabi, a bus driver in Tehran, leads an unremarkable life. A solitary man since the unexpected deaths of his father and mother years ago, he is decidedly apoliticalāeven during the driverās strike and its bloody end. But everyone has their breaking point, and Yunus has reached his.
Handcuffed and blindfolded, he is taken to the infamous Evin prison for political dissidents. Inside this stark, strangely ordered world, his fate becomes entwined with Hajj Saeed, his personal interrogator. The two develop a disturbing yet interdependent relationship, with each playing his assigned role in a high stakes psychological game of cat and mouse, where Yunus endures a mind-bending cycle of solitary confinement and interrogation. In their startlingly intimate exchanges, Yunusās life begins to unfoldāfrom his childhood memories growing up in a freer Iran to his heartbreaking betrayal of his only friend. As Yunus struggles to hold on to his sanity and evade Saeedās increasingly undeniable accusations, he must eventually make an impossible choice: continue fighting or submit to the system of lies upholding Iranās power.
Gripping, startling, and masterfully told, Then the Fish Swallowed Him is a haunting story of life under despotism.