A Nearby Country Called Love: A Novel

“Once I glanced at this book I couldn’t stop reading, staying up late to gallop through this harrowing, beautiful, surprising novel in one evening. It is an evocation of characters I came to care about, a portrait of everyday life in contemporary Iran, & a profound depiction of gender roles as prisons, & of who escapes these prisons at what cost.” — Rebecca Solnit

A sweeping, propulsive novel about the families we are born into & the families we make for ourselves, in which a man struggles to find his place in an Iran on the brink of combusting. Vibrant & evocative, intimate and intelligent, A Nearby Country Called Love is both a captivating window into contemporary Iran & a portrait of the parallel fates of a man and his country—a man who acknowledges the sullen & rumbling baggage of history but then chooses to step past its violent inheritance.

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Salar Abdoh is an author & writer. His latest novel is A Nearby Country Called Love (Viking Penguin, 2023). His book, Out of Mesopotamia (Akashic, 2020), has been hailed as “One of a handful of great modern war novels,” & was a NYTimes Editors’ Choice, & also selected as a Best Book of the year across several platforms, including Publishers Weekly. He is also the author of Tehran At Twilight, Opium, & The Poet Game, & editor & translator of the celebrated crime collection, Tehran Noir. 

Mostly dividing his time between New York City & Tehran, Iran, Salar regularly publishes personal essays & short stories, plus numerous translations of other authors that appear in journals across the world. A professor at the City University of New York’s City College campus in Harlem, he conducts workshops in the English Department’s MFA program & also directs undergraduate creative writing.