My Father's Notebook

When he was a boy, Aga Akbar -- the illegitimate, deaf-mute son of a Persian nobleman -- travelled with his uncle to a cave on nearby Saffron Mountain. Once there, he was to transcribe a cuneiform inscription over three thousand years old. Decades later, his son, Ishmael, a political dissident in exile, attempts to translate a notebook filled with a private language made from this ancient script and in the process tells his father's story, his own, and the story of twentieth-century Iran. "My Father's Notebook" is at once a masterful chronicle of a culture's troubled voyage into modernity and the heart-rending, timeless tale of a son's enduring love.