Frozen Sparrows

An Iranian Gothic tale of a woman trying to hold onto her family against the menaces closing in

Maryam’s husband told her he needed to take the family someplace isolated so he could write his novel. She hadn’t imagined it would be a house surrounded by endless snows, the only other house nearby inhabited by the witchlike Nastaran Khanoum, who sneaks into her home at night and whispers stories to her sleeping children. That in her basement would live a giant, too terrible to look at, who watches over her family. Then Maryam begins to see what other people are doing through their eyes far away, and ghosts come in and out of her life.  When her son gets lost in the snow and the woman’s house next door is suddenly erased, Maryam must grapple with her reality, which may be more horrible than her visions.

A dark, poetic knot of a novel, Frozen Sparrows, translated lushly from Farsi by AJ Javaheri, is the first novel in English from the great Iranian author Maryam Hosseinian. A book about love, grief, writing, and isolation, you’ll end up listening for scratching from beneath the floorboards and movement in the dark shadows in the corners.