Nahid is fifty and had just received a terminal diagnosis. She is also a refugee in Sweden having fled the Iranian Revolution in [date]. She takes us deep into her difficult feelings, with flashbacks of her traumatic past, from her links to the Iranian resistance, her flight and her relationships, the effect of her exile from the land of her birth. Her narrative of the refugee experience is searing, her feeling of being cut off from her roots, her difficulties building a feeling of home in a new country, her rightful pride in her own proven strength.

“People often see me as a victim. They expect me to be weak, submissive. As a refugee woman. I don’t understand their thinking. Don’t they realise I’m here because I’m strong? That it takes strength not to give up, to refuse to accept misery and oppression? Sometimes I wonder if they think they’re strong, that strength comes from never facing hardship. If they think a placid life builds resilience.”

Central to the story is her difficult relationship with her daughter Aram who is perfectly at home in Sweden and is expecting her first child with her Swedish partner. Nahid resents Aram’s comfort, the ways that her daughter can’t understand her or her experience making their interactions thorny and brittle but also full of love.

“I made that heart. Her heart once beat inside mine…soon it will beat without me. Soon my heart will fall silent, and hers will beat on, carrying my rhythm with it. Somewhere in her heartbeat I’ll remain.”

Bonde brilliantly articulates the complex emotions and character of a woman created by a life of pain and struggle who will now die, young, having never really had the chance to live. Nahid is angry, with her lot and with her life and with her daughter and her anger saturates this powerful, visceral novel. Bonde’s prose is piercing as she speaks about trauma and loss and their consequences, which affect more than just those who experience them directly.

It’s not often that I feel that a book would be better for being longer, rather the opposite, but Bonde touches on so many things, offers us glimpses of so much of Nahid’s life that sometimes I was longing for just a little more detail. On balance, however, I would rather preserve the wonderful, spare beauty of her writing than upset it with superfluous minutiae.

Thank you for the opportunity to read this book. Unfortunately I did not enjoy it enough and would not post a negative review online.

Good luck to the author and thank you again!

My favourite book of the year so far. So much pain passed from generation to generation, Nahid's voice is infuriating and sad all at the same time and the reader really struggles with thinking her selfish and feeling so terribly sad for her. It was incredibly powerful.