Description

Reading sample:

When I think back to this place, the memory of this woman takes hold of me, as if she herself built the houses of this place stone by stone and with her own delicate hands, although her presence there was actually quite short-lived. In Kaban, my place of birth, a lot has changed now. The village is much larger than it was then, more precisely it is no longer a village but a medium-sized town. The apartments are much smaller than they were then, the alleys and streets are narrower, cars and motorbikes race back and forth, and there is a lot of activity everywhere. People don't know each other anymore and, accordingly, when they meet other people on the streets, they don't greet each other, almost as if they are bewitched.
[…]
Hometown is always where we are expected to be. And I don't think you can completely leave a city, a house where you once lived as a child. You carry the place on your shoulders, and no matter where you arrive, you unpack everything and you're back in the same house from back then. You can watch what's happening on the new street from the old, familiar windows. Even if you fall in love later, you can still see your new love out of these dusty windows. Otherwise there are no other windows. Otherwise there is no new love.
[…]
Everything was supposed to be the same as in any school, but I noticed that everything was very different at the same time. The sound of her voice, her name taking on a different form and meaning on the blackboard and in my head.
[…]
A few days later, she suggested “Letter to an Absent Loved One” as the subject for the first essay lesson. She pulled a book out of her leather bag and read to us for a few minutes. They were examples of how to start a letter, how to get to the central topic and how to end it. In the next hour she collected our essay notebooks and a day later she announced that the essays by Rahman, Hassan and me were the best. So we had to read.

Reviews and press:

"More of a coincidence,” he says about coming to Germany, a country where, to his surprise, German is spoken and not English. Iranian Salem Khalfani was 22 when he landed in Europe. Where was not so important to him – only the will to study. That was impossible at home in Iran after the Islamic Revolution for political reasons. (...) more