For Every Person You Kill

From the author of internationally bestselling Children of the Jacaranda Tree, an intimate examination of life after political imprisonment in post-revolutionary Iran...

Tehran, 1980s. After four years of confinement, political dissidents Azar and Ismael are released from Evin Prison. They have not seen their daughter, Neda, since she was an infant born within the walls of Evin—she is a stranger to them both, a reminder of all Azar and Ismael have lost, and all they must struggle to re-gain as they process the brutality they have been subjected to.  

Manhattan, 2026. Neda, now in her forties, grapples with the weight of the literary success she’s received by writing about her parents’ lives. As the United States continues to bomb Iran, and the Iranian government violently cracks down on its citizens, Neda must confront her own guilt—increasingly aware that she has made a career of writing about the trauma of others. 

As warm-blooded and intimate as it is politically engaged, For Every Person You Kill asks difficult questions about the complexities of turning one’s family trauma into art: is it homage, or theft? And what right does one have to tell the story of a country and a people they have left behind?