The highly anticipated follow-up to Sahar Delijani’s internationally bestselling debut, Children of the Jacaranda Tree, which was inspired by her parents’ political persecution and subsequent imprisonment in post-revolutionary Iran. Now, in her sophomore novel, FOR EVERY PERSON YOU KILL, Sahar turns her attention to life after prison, examining the intergenerational legacy of trauma born of incarceration.
FOR EVERY PERSON YOU KILL
by Sahar Delijani
Melville House, April 2027
(via Writers House)
Set between the violent aftermath of the 1979 Iranian revolution and the recent Woman Life Freedom uprising in 2022, this novel also explores both the power and the limits of storytelling to grapple with that trauma: what happens when we metabolize our personal suffering through writing? What does it mean when that intimate story becomes part of a larger collective memory? And does the act of telling that story hold the power to stop history from repeating itself?
Tehran, 1980s. The daughter of political dissidents, Neda is born inside the walls of the notorious Evin Prison. She doesn’t meet her parents again until they are released when she is four years old, but their estrangement doesn’t end with their long-awaited embrace. Neda feels shy and awkward around Azar and Ismael, who in turn wrestle with how to be parents as they process the brutality they have been subjected to and struggle to rebuild their shattered lives…
Manhattan, 2022. Neda, now in her forties, and on her way to a reading for her second novel, grapples with the weight of her literary success. As a renewed wave of violent crackdowns on protesters fighting the same regime that once persecuted her family takes hold of the country of her birth, Neda struggles to prepare herself mentally and emotionally to face an audience. She is so weary of walking the tightrope between public and private, spokeswoman and survivor, and increasingly aware that she has made a career of writing about the trauma of others without fully examining her own…
As warm-blooded and intimate as it is politically engaged, FOR EVERY PERSON YOU KILL is a work of autobiographical literary fiction for readers of Homeland Elegies and In the Shadow of the Banyan. It joins the canon of literature about the act of writing literature, alongside such works as the Neapolitan Novels and The Book of Goose.
Sahar Delijani is the author of Children of the Jacaranda Tree an autobiographical novel which has been translated into 30 languages and published in more than 75 countries. It was a Women’s National Book Association’s Great Group selection, an Indie Next Pick, a CBS Local Best Book Club Pick, a finalist for Italy’s Elle Gran Premio, one of Vogue India’s Top 10 Big Reads, and a candidate for France’s Prix des Lecteurs Sélection by Le Livre de Poche. Born in Iran in 1983, she grew up in California, lived for many years in Italy, and currently resides in New York City.