Things I've Been Silent About transports us to a world that is at once enchanting and threatening; it is a tale that mixes family feuds, politics and literature and holds our interest from the first to the last page

A beautiful and sensitive book... [Nafisi's] belief in the power of culture to transform lives and societies is inspiring

A companion memoir to the bestselling Reading Lolita in Tehran, this is Azar Nafisi's more personal account of growing up in Iran...an intriguing memoir

Nafisi's account is rarely shrill or self pitying, preferring to let her stories tell themselves

This powerful memoir, from the author of the global hit Reading Lolita in Tehran, is a bewitching story ... Set against the background of change before the Islamic Revolution, it is a complex, provocative story of family life, lies and loves

Nafisi proves a compelling, and moving, witness

If you enjoyed the wonderful Reading Lolita in Tehran by this author, you have another treat in store... it offers wonderful insights

Nafisi is eloquent and expressive

In her new book Nafisi ... once again blends the autobiographical and the political to write about the Iran of the past 80 years ... Nafisi, who has proven her political mettle by standing against both the Shad's and the Ayatollah's regimes, confronts her "inner censors" in this account of the life of a dysfunctional family in revolutionary times. She used the story of her intellectually and politically prominent family as the "backdrop" to the turbulent history of 20th century Iran, a country trying to come to terms with modernity while remaining true to both its Islamic and imperial histories...Nafisi's vivid snapshots of life in pre-revolutionary Iran among the intellectual and political elite, with constant streams of social gatherings and endless political chatter and gossip, brings back to life a cultural milieu that largely disappeared with the 1979 Islamic revolution ... [and] the personal is skilfully interwoven with the social and political

This is a poignant memoir: part therapy, part chronicle

Things I've Been Silent About is a kind of companion volume to Nafisi's 2003 memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran ... giving us finely etched portraits of her tempestuous authoritarian mother, and her doting, unassertive father, who was a mayor Tehran under the Shah

A portrait of a family and a country that are at once alluring and deeply dysfunctional

[A] beautifully written memoir

A gifted storyteller with a mastery of Western literature, Nafisi knows how to use language both to settle scores and to seduce. Her family secrets pour forth in a flood of revelations of anger, humiliation and deceit

An utterly memorable book

All readers should read it

Enthralled

This is a remarkable insight into a fascinating period of history, and a touching portrait of astonishing tenacity and integrity in the face of adversity that few in the Western world could imagine

A balanced, lucid narrative; a rich, complex account of this crucial part of Iranian history

A powerful memoir of Nafisi's Iranian childhood, her mother and a homeland shattered by political revolution