Iran, 1950. Spring has arrived, and as the women prepare the festivities, Sadiq waits for a suitor to knock on the door.

Her uncle Nosrat returns from Tehran with a glamorous woman, while on the rooftop, Shahbal longs only for a television to watch the first moon landing. But not even the beloved grandmothers can foresee what will happen in the days and months to come.

In this uplifting bestseller, Kader Abdolah charts the triumphs and tragedies of a family on the brink of revolution.

When he was a boy, Aga Akbar, the deaf-mute illegitimate son of a Persian nobleman, traveled with his uncle to a cave on nearby Saffron Mountain. Once there, he was to copy a three-thousand-year-old cuneiform inscription--an order of the first king of Persia--as a means of freeing himself from his emotional confinement. For the remainder of his life, Aga Akbar used these cuneiform characters to fill a notebook with writings only he could understand. Years later, his son, Ishmael--a political dissident in exile--is attempting to translate the notebook . . . and in the process tells his father's story, his own, and the story of twentieth-century Iran.

A stunning and ambitious novel by a singular literary talent, "My Father's Notebook" is at once a masterful chronicle of a culture's troubled voyage into modernity and the poignant, timeless tale of a son's enduring love.

When he was a boy, Aga Akbar, the illegitimate, deaf son of a Persian nobleman, travelled with his uncle to a cave on nearby Saffron Mountain. Once there, he was to transcribe a cuneiform inscription over three thousand years old. Decades later, his son, Ishmael - a political dissident in exile - attempts to translate a notebook filled with a private language made from this ancient script . . . and in the process tells his father's story, his own, and the story of twentieth-century Iran. My Father's Notebook is at once a masterful chronicle of a culture's troubled voyage into modernity and the heart-rending, timeless tale of a son's enduring love.

The way things flow: exploring the movement of bodies, data and goods Mobility shapes society in countless ways. Looking at society from the perspective of mobility reveals that its key moments of development coincide with the removal of obstacles to human flow--in the physical movement of people, goods, ideas, and spoken and written language. This book explores mobility in various essayistic modes, from visual essays to scientific essay to broad cultural speculations. Mobility Society addresses, among other topics, energy politics and oil's grip on everyday life; urban transportation policy; the restrictions placed upon differently abled bodies; patterns of data flow; human mobility and Blackness; the politics of speed; concepts of "freedom" in relation to mobility; the appearance and experience of permanence in architectural and other objects; geological movement; and the politics of mobile phones. The design of the book encourages the reader to discover and explore unsuspected relations between mobilities and aspects of our evolving society.