The journey was undertaken in 1926 by Ronald Sinclair, revealed, after his death, to have been an important British secret agent - Reginald Teague-Jones.

    In styles ranging from the dark to the humorous, from the elegant to the poetic, these stories depict aspects of both traditional and modern life in Iran with its many religious, political, cultural and class tensions. The expanding role of women in Iranian society is attested to both by the large number of women writers included in the volume, and by the central role played by women in many of the stories. WRITTEN DURING the last 75 years and arranged in chronological order, these stories span a period in Iranian history from the Constitutional Revolution (1906-11) through the long reign of the Pahlavis (1925-79), the upheavals of the 1950s, the 1979 Islamic Revolution, to the present.