When the Moon is Low

 Fiction by Nadia Hashimi

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

At the beginning of this story, Fereiba is on a long and perilous journey across Europe with her three children, fleeing her home in Kabul, Afghanistan. The story then takes the reader back in time to Fereiba's childhood and early life. She had loved her homeland as a younger woman, but when the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in 1989, everything changed. Now she is tying to take her family to England where she has relatives, but there are many obstacles along the way.

This was a good book with wonderful characters who help the reader identify with them easily. The story helped me understand a lot about the Afghani people. I didn't love the way the author handled the ending, but overall I enjoyed the novel.

Everything Sad is Untrue

 Fiction by Daniel Nayeri

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

The cover of this book asserts that it is a true story, even though it's classified officially as a young adult novel. This is because it's a memoir that cannot be independently verified, I think, because it is indeed the true story of the author's childhood history.

Daniel was born in Iran, and he was named Khosrou and his family was wealthy. But when he was about five, his mother converted to Christianity and had to flee the country with him and his sister, leaving behind everything in order to live in poverty in Oklahoma instead. In this book, 12-year-old Daniel is trying to explain his origins to a class full of kids who don't know the different between Iran and Iraq, and think that his lunches smell weird.

It's an amazing story. I don't know why it is called "Everything Sad is Untrue," though. I would pick a different title.

In the Time of Our History

 Amazon Prime Kindle Fiction by Susanne Pari

https://www.amazon.com

Mitra Jahani feels like she gave up a lot to save her younger sister Ana. When their controlling Iranian-American father refused to let Ana get married until Mitra agreed to marry also (to a suitable Iranian boy chosen by her father, of course), Mitra acquiesced to the wedding but backed out at the last minute in a dramatic fashion: she had sterilization surgery and rendered herself unmarriageable.

But then Ana died suddenly, and since her death Mitra has struggled to find a purpose for herself in this world where she is sisterless. Now it is the one-year anniversary of Ana's death and Mitra is traveling to New York for the family ceremony. (Apparently Iranians have a second funeral service for this. I think it's a really interesting idea.) Mitra must finally confront her estranged father and try to come to terms with Ana's death all at once.

This was a good character story about both Iranian culture and about the relationship between sisters.

I also read recently (for free) from Amazon Prime Kindle: Don't Believe it

On Wings of Eagles

Nonfiction by Ken Follett.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

What do you know about Ross Perot? All I personally knew before reading this book was about his failed election campaign of 1992. I was in college at that time, and mostly I remember my Republican relatives blaming Perot for the fact that Bill Clinton had been elected. (I don't think this is completely unfair, either; the fact is that he split the conservative vote by running against the party nominee, and he should have known it was impossible to win without a major party nomination.) At the time Perot was a bit of a comic figure, a billionaire who thought he could be president, and failed to win.

Well, this book is all about something I DIDN'T know about Perot. He was a bit of a bad-ass, apparently. In 1978, Perot's company was working with the Shah of Iran on a government computerization project when a couple of his employees got caught in the political crossfire of a revolution and ended up in Iranian jail with an exorbitant bail/ransom price-tag on their heads. Perot was determined to get them out, and this book is the story of how that happened.

I also read recently by this author: Triple

Warning! Long parenthetical aside about classification: (I couldn't decide whether to categorize this book as fiction or nonfiction. I've read most of Ken Follet's books, and most of them are fiction, although many are based on true historical events. This one, however, is about rather recent history, and the author explicitly states in the beginning that everything written in it is true to the best of his knowledge, and not a novelization. Still, I was unsure. I had listened to the story on audiobook, and so I did not have a paper copy to refer to, and the barnesandnoble.com record referenced above did not classify one way or the other. I decided to try to settle the question by checking to see if the library categorized the book as fiction and filed by author's name, or if they had assigned it a Dewey Decimal number and marked it as nonfiction. Interestingly, my local library system had a record of several copies of this book, and about half of them were filed under fiction, and half under nonfiction. So the library didn't know what to do either!)

The Flight Attendant

Fiction by Chris Bohjalian.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

Cassie the flight attendant is a hot mess. She drinks too much and does crazy or stupid things, and then forgets she has done them. She sleeps with strange men she never wants to see again, and sometimes forgets that too. And because her job takes her all around the world, she can do these crazy/stupid things in the United States AND abroad.

So far she's managed to keep her job with the airline, but when she wakes up in a strange hotel after a blackout in Dubai, she realizes that things may have gone too far. The UAE, like many Middle Eastern countries, is not particularly forgiving of foreigners who may be lawbreakers. Her one goal is to get back to New York unscathed. But after that, who knows what will happen?

This was a good story with interesting characters and a few surprises.

I also read by this author: The Double Bind

Where We Belong

Fiction by Lynn Austin.

https://m.barnesandnoble.com

In this story, a pair of sisters in that late nineteenth century travel to the Middle East to discover historical documents that prove the truth of the Bible. Although fictionalized, the characters are based on a real pair of sisters who actually did this.

It was an interesting book!

I also read recently by this author: Until We Reach Home