‘An important and life-affirming memoir … Arash reveals the true spirit of Iran.’
Paulo Coelho, author of The Alchemist

In 1979, Arash Hejazi was nine years old. Within months, the Iranian Islamic revolution had transformed his world. The Shah was gone, Ayatollah Khomeini had returned from exile, and the country was being remade around him. Music disappeared from television. Schools were segregated. Books, films and ideas could become dangerous. Then came Saddam Hussein’s invasion and eight years of war, bringing death, fear and sacrifice into the lives of a generation still growing up.

But there was always another Iran.

It survived in homes and friendships, in jokes and arguments, in forbidden books and private conversations, in poetry, music and the stubborn determination to think for oneself. It was irreverent, curious, contradictory and deeply alive, an Iran that could not easily be reconciled with the country presented either by its rulers or by the outside world.

The Gaze of the Gazelle is the story of that Iran, told through one life.

Over the next three decades, Arash grows from a child of the revolution into a doctor, writer and publisher. He falls in love, builds friendships, discovers literature and enters a cultural world constantly negotiating the boundaries of what can be written, published, said and believed. Private life unfolds against public upheaval as hope repeatedly collides with repression.

For Arash, books become both refuge and battleground. As a publisher, he confronts censorship and defends the freedom to read, think and choose. Around him, a generation raised entirely under the Islamic Republic begins to question the certainties imposed upon it and to imagine a different relationship with its country, its history and its future.

Then, on 20 June 2009, amid demonstrations following the disputed presidential election, history breaks violently into Arash’s life. He is the man seen in the footage trying to save Neda Agha-Soltan after she is shot on a Tehran street. When he tells the world what he witnessed, the consequences are irreversible. He is forced into exile, leaving behind the country in which almost every part of his life has been rooted.

Yet Neda’s death is not the beginning of this story. It is the point towards which three decades of Iranian history have been moving.

Blending memoir, history, politics, Persian literature and mythology, The Gaze of the Gazelle is an intimate account of growing up under the Islamic Republic, of war and censorship, friendship and love, idealism and disillusionment, belonging and exile. It is also the story of a generation shaped by revolution but unwilling to let the revolution define the limits of its life.

Above all, this is a portrait of the Iran rarely seen from outside: irreverent and serious, contradictory and deeply literary, passionate, wounded by history and stubbornly alive.