Birds in a Gale

A kaleidoscopic novel of politics, identity, and dislocation in the wake of the Islamic Revolution. Some years after the overthrow of the Shah, Mehraban has returned to Iran after a period of wandering and isolation to write the story of a famed Kurdish revolutionary named Farhad. Guided by our unnamed narrator, Mehraban pursues his story and its living-dead subject, learning that he and Farhad share bittersweet memories of a lost love amid fractured historical nightmares. Trapped in consciousness, trapped by mortality, trapped in a world that is not and cannot be objective, Birds in a Gale turns in on itself, entangling Mehraban’s and Farhad’s once-separate identities irrevocably, before rejecting the objective altogether. Originally published in 2002, Birds in a Gale is a poignant, psychological, and deeply political effort by one of Kurdistan’s best-loved writers to restore the Kurds to their rightful place in revolutionary history. This inventive metatext, lucidly translated by