Publisher's Synopsis
Kamin Mohammadi was nine years old when her family fled
Iran during the 1979 Revolution. Bewildered by the seismic changes in her
homeland, she turned her back on the past and spent her teenage years trying to
fit in with British attitudes to family, food and freedom. She was twenty-seven
before she returned to Iran, drawn inexorably back by memories of her grandmother's house in Abadan, with
its traditional inner courtyard, its noisy gatherings and its very walls
steeped in history.
The Cypress Tree is Kamin's account of her journey
home, to rediscover her Iranian self and to discover for the first time the
story of her family: a sprawling clan that sprang from humble roots to bloom
during the affluent, Biba-clad 1960s, only to be shaken by the horrors of the Iran-Iraq
War and the heartbreak of exile, and toughened by the struggle for democracy
that continues today.
This moving and
passionate memoir is a love letter both to Kamin's extraordinary family and to
Iran itself, an ancient country which has survived so much modern tumult but
where joy and resilience will always triumph over despair.
