The Persians

by Sanam Mahloudji

SHORTLISTED for the Women’s Prize 2025. A darkly funny, life-affirming debut novel following five women from a once illustrious Iranian family as they grapple with revolutions personal and political. Meet the Valiat family. In Iran, they were somebodies. In America, they’re nobodies.

“Sanam Mahloudji’s The Persians is exuberant, whip-smart, infused with melancholy, tragicomic, huge-hearted and sharp-toothed – like the proud Valiat sisters, aunts, mothers and nieces who populate its pages. Seventy years of Iranian and diaspora history are the backdrop to this swirling portrait of an emigre family, glinting with read-out-loud sentences. A joy of a debut novel by the real deal.” —David Mitchell, Booker Prize shortlisted author of Cloud Atlas.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sanam Mahloudji is an American writer born in Tehran and based in London. Her debut novel THE PERSIANS has been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize 2025. Her fiction has won a Pushcart Prize and appears in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, the Kenyon Review, the Idaho Review, Passages North and elsewhere. She was nominated for a 2018 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers for her first published story. Her work has been anthologized in All of Me: Stories of Love, Anger, and the Female Body and Mothers Before: Stories and Portraits of Our Mothers as We Never Saw Them.