The Blindfold Horse: Memories of a Persian Childhood - Couverture souple

Long before the momentous Iranian Revolution of 1979, which placed the country under strict religious rule, Shusha Guppy grew up in a Persia delicately balanced between traditional Islamic society and the transforming forces of westernisation. In this eloquent memoir, she recreates the lost world of her childhood before the oil boom and the eventual overthrow of the Shah. Her magical tales about relatives and friends, music and drama, religious holidays and celebrations are interwoven with myth and legend, poetry and anecdote and provide a rare and optimistic portrayal of Iran. This is an enlightening and moving testimony of a vanished world: a story as vibrant as Iran itself.

Shusha Guppy was born and brought up in Iran. She moved to Paris when she was 17 to study at the Sorbonne and moved to London in the early 1960s. Formerly London Editor of The Paris Review, she wrote for publications on both sides of the Atlantic and as a broadcaster she contributed to a variety of cultural programmes for the BBC. Shusha was the author of two prize-winning and much-loved memoirs, The Blindfold Horse and A Girl in Paris, as well as the acclaimed The Secret of Laughter: Magical Tales from Classical Persia. She died in 2008.