Gūgird Persiska (Farsi) 2024

In a time of famine, a dog is born in a trench in Tehran—a dog that is immortal. This dog becomes the witness to a strange and unprecedented experiment: in the basement of one of Tehran’s earliest pharmacies, a man dressed in black shares a dreadful secret with an orphaned errand boy, a secret soaked in blood and saturated with the smell of sulfur.

But not every sense is capable of hearing this secret. One must be a dog—and being a dog is not for everyone. Who would choose a dog’s life, and still have the endurance to live it, even if the great reward were immortality?

By the testimony of spilled blood, the smell of sulfur has been the dominant scent in the sky over Iran for the past hundred years. Yet this smell is not only that of explosions, blood, and death. If you sharpen your senses, you will also detect within it the fragrance of liberation—a scent that carries you deep into the world, down to the very core of the earth.

In her new novel, Atiyeh Attarzadeh, moving through the winding byways of Iran’s contemporary history—saturated with the sweet scent of revolutions, the stench of corruption, decay, and wounds—leads the reader into a world beyond history, hope, illusion, and fear: a world woven from flesh and body, a world entirely of color, taste, and smell—the world of the elemental substance of the universe: sulfur.