We can only be happy about such great feedback!
Jalal Rostami Goran from the triple award-winning bookstore Goethe & Hafis has for the Bonn General Gazette a few words about the novel of our author Maryam Djahani written:
"Curiosity and a sense of home came over me when I came across the novel Unrestrained by Kermanshah. My hometown, which I was forced to leave 36 years ago because of my political resistance, now graces the title of a book. Reading it was like a journey through my homeland, yes, like a reunion that I have been denied since my escape to this day.
Impressively and through the eyes of the protagonist Shohre, the reader is shown the complex societal and social barriers for women in Iran, where women find themselves in a daily struggle, a struggle against traditions and taboos. Women who have to "stand their ground" every day because the government does not give them the slightest right. This is also the case for Shohre, who grew up in this traditional society, in a middle-class family, as the daughter of a family, but above all of a father who was not given a son. Already in her childhood Shohre was rather rebellious. Her father's upbringing reinforced this.
Shohre decides to become a cab driver in a town where her colleagues and almost everyone are men who have absolutely no respect for a woman cab driver. For her, driving a taxi is a profession in which she feels equal to men. One may recall Virginia Woolf's essay A Room of Her Own.
Their routes are characterized by the always exciting, surprising exchanges of words with their passengers. This novel shows us how a young writer after the Islamic revolution, despite all reprisals, censorship and the pressure of self-censorship, finds a way, through the power of language, to portray the protagonist Schohre as an example of how women in Iran assert themselves in patriarchal structures . Just as the language asserts itself and ultimately even self-censorship cannot harm it, the women in Iran also assert themselves: they assert themselves.”
Jalal Rostami Goran, Goethe & Hafis
