Age of Orphans - Tapa dura

A Kurdish boy is forced to betray his people, in service of the new Iranian nation, with tragic consequences.

Reza had been like any other Kurdish boy; but after he is orphaned in a massacre by the armies of Iran's new shah, everything changes. Later, as husband to a Tehrani woman, and as a military officer, his duties bring him face to face with his past.

Told with an evocative richness of language that recalls the work of Michael Ondaatje and Anita Desai, the story of Reza Khourdi is that of the twentieth-century Everyman who cannot help but yearn for the impossible dreams of love, land, and home. This is a universal story of the casualties of war by a stunning new voice.

Laleh Khadivi was born in Iran in 1977, but fled with her family to the United States in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution. She has taught, and worked as a documentary film maker, and currently lives in Atlanta, where she is Fiction Fellow at Emory University.