Prison Memoir

Shahrnush Parsipur’s work is like medicine for this world. While she did not live to see the people of Iran gain their freedom, she continues to pave the way through her writing

Shahrnush Parsipur was one of Iran’s most vital, celebrated literary voices, who wrote fearlessly of female desire and liberation. Her unflinching, often surprising memoir is published here in its entirety in English for the first time. 
 
In Prison Memoir we see Parsipur at twenty-five, when she divorces her husband and tries to make an independent life for herself and her young son in Paris. But the turmoil of post-revolutionary Tehran soon draws her back, even though she is imprisoned four times, first for resigning from her TV job in protest at the execution of two poets, and later for publishing her celebrated novel Women Without Men, eventually to be driven into exile. 
 
Moving and impassioned, yet told with flashes of humour, Prison Memoir captures the surreal experience of serving time as a political prisoner without charge, witnessing the systematic elimination of opposition to fundamentalist power, and trying to make sense of it all in the aftermath.

Shahrnush Parsipur

Faridoun Farrokh

Parsipur's layered tales, glittering in a fresh translation, continue to beckon you into a world that is simultaneously scoured by reality, and touched with fable and myth

Candid, enlightening and entertaining … There’s a sense of glee, where suffering goes out the other side and comes back as exuberance

Whenever she goes through an experience that might be leveraged for epiphany, catharsis or a clear moral lesson, Parsipur always goes for something more unexpected. It’s this that makes Women Without Men, for all its outlandish moments, profoundly human

Powerful … Parsipur blends magical realism with the heightened drama of a fairy tale, inverting familiar tropes … As the layers of misogyny are peeled back, the work’s full force emerges

Parsipur is one of Iran’s most celebrated living writers, and one of our boldest, most original feminists

Confronting, surreal and laced with Iranian mythology, Women Without Men sweeps you away in just over 100 pages. It is a defiant exploration of sexuality and identity through the interwoven lives of five women as they break free … and imagine a world beyond male control

Gracefully brutal... Parsipur writes with the surface simplicity of a tale-teller. But she drops in prosaic, stinging touches of realism - of gossip, envy, suppressed thoughts and misunderstandings

Using the techniques of both the fabulist and the polemicist, Parsipur continues her protest against traditional Persian gender relations in this charming, powerful novel

The feminist book that Iran’s regime has failed to silence since the 80s … The UK publication marks a hard-won return for a work that has outlasted bans, by a writer who has survived incarceration and forced displacement

Parsipur is a courageous, talented woman, and above all, a great writer

Women Without Men is the best feminist novel I know. It's thrilling, beautiful and hilarious, filled with weird women in transformation and the violent little men desperately trying to control them. I am convinced this novel is in fact a magic trick. Reading it feels like being invited to the rebellious unveiling of an age-old secret. It is both deeply mysterious and clear as water, filled to the brim with undeniable truth

This internationally acclaimed masterpiece by one of Iran’s most important and influential writers traces the interwoven destinies of five women – including a wealthy middle-aged housewife, a sex worker and a schoolteacher – as they arrive by different paths to live together in an abundant garden on the outskirts of Tehran.Drawing on recent Iranian history and transcendent elements of Islamic mysticism, Parsipur’s unforgettable novel sees women escaping strict confines of family and society. It is still as pertinent and discerning today as it was when travelling secretly from hand to hand upon its first publication in 1989.

Shahrnush Parsipur

Books by Shahrnush Parsipur

Series by Shahrnush Parsipur

Penguin International Writers

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter