The House of the Edrisis

"Like all revolutions, this one too has led to a regime more despotic than the one it replaced." So observes an omniscient narrator in Ghazaleh Alizadeh’s monumental novel The House of the Edrisis, offering a darkly comedic glimpse at the aftermath of an unnamed twentieth-century uprising. In this concluding volume, the revolutionary tumult that has consumed the aristocratic Edrisi family and their opulent mansion shows no signs of abating.

As a ragtag band of squatters-turned-rulers consolidates power through surveillance and intimidation, the novel’s eccentric cast of characters is forced to reckon with upended social orders. Erstwhile revolutionaries become complicit enforcers of a new authoritarian regime, their lofty slogans of liberation curdling into doublespeak. At the center of this story stands the ancestral Edrisi manor—a fading palace that seems to contain multitudes. Its once-vibrant gardens and courtyards, rendered in lush descriptive passages, now serve as haunted stages for madness, romance, violence, and philosophical reflection in turn. Lauded as a crowning achievement of modern Persian literature, this first-ever English translation of The House of the Edrisis in two volumes offers an unforgettable immersion in one writer’s vision of the perils and pathos of a world remade by revolution.