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THE LEMON GROVE

Ali Hosseini

Identical twins Ruzbeh and Behruz are at the center of Ali Hosseini's debut novel in English--a story about love, redemption, and the courage to survive in the face of calamity and loss.

The novel begins in the small town in southern Iran where the boys were raised and in their summer home which is surrounded by a lemon grove. Their idyll is shattered by personal and geopolitical events. Both boys fall in love with Shireen, a childhood friend. Behruz goes to America to escape the pain of competing for Shireen's affections. Ruzbeh fights in the Iran/Iraq war and ends up alone and wandering the streets. When Behruz returns to Iran to help his shell-shocked brother, he finds the country devastated by revolution and war. His return sets off a string of events that change all their lives. Ali Hosseini is an Iranian American who came to the United States as a student in the seventies. He has published a novel and two short story collections in Iran, and his short fiction has been published in Persion in the United States in "Par Monthly" and "Persian Book Review". His work in English has been published in "Epoch", "Fiction International" and other journals. He lives in the Boston area.

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Book Published 2012-08-01 by Curbstone Press/Northwestern UP

Comments

Ali Hosseini takes us to vivid places in the landscape and heart of a contemporary Iran sorely missing from the news bites; weaves a masterful tale of Persia's many subcultures caught in a changing climate of intolerance and of one man's agony, remorse, redemption--a story of love lost and found.

[The Lemon Grove] is very polished, the characters believably real, and the story evocative.

Foreign sale to Turkey (Pegasus)

Ali Hosseini’s The Lemon Grove, the author’s first novel written in English, is a moving story set in Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. The characters are well-defined, the landscape vivid and the culture personal—we care about what happens to the characters, and we learn more than most Americans know about the country.... These people are kind and struggling, hiding from a ruthless regime—yet, like the orchard’s few remaining lemons, they are amazingly alive. The setting is austere yet haunting, and this beautifully written book is a page-turner right up to its hopeful ending. Read more...

Hosseini's deceptively simple narrative pulses with vibrancy and genuine emotion, and his deft deployment of details imbues this short novel with an enthralling sense of character, time, and place. Read more...

From the start, the intimate relationships portrayed in this novel, set in contemporary Iran, provide as much drama as the turbulent politics that surround them. The intensity of the story, global and personal, will spark discussion. Read more...