The Age of Orphans
By Laleh Khadivi
Bloomsbury £14.99, 292 pages
FT Bookshop price £11.99

There is much to admire in the debut novel by Iranian filmmaker and writer Laleh Khadivi. The Age of Orphans is a bold and beautiful work of fiction based loosely, we are told, on her own family’s story. It tells the melancholy tale of a Kurdish boy’s loss of home and identity, set against the birth of a new country.

The novel opens in the Zagros mountains of Kurdistan in the 1920s. The unnamed boy, born to a woman spurned by other villagers, likes nothing more than to pretend he is a bird. When not swooping off rooftops, he lives in the protected world of aunts and girl-cousins, and is never far from his mother’s breast.

But this state of innocence is short-lived. Barely nine, he is already considered on the cusp of manhood. He is taken into the mountains by his father and uncles for a brutal circumcision ritual. Banished from his coddled life among women, he must learn to live in the world of gruff tribal warriors.

When word comes that the Shah’s soldiers are in the mountains, the boy joins the expedition to fight them off, only to find himself orphaned, captured and forcefully recruited into the Shah’s army.

He is given a new name – Reza. He rises through the ranks. He almost manages to shake off his Kurdish heritage. But his first posting to Kurdistan reveals that his new sense of self is only superficial.

Khadivi’s language is sensuous and rich, though she can be heavy-handed in its deployment. Clarity is occasionally sacrificed at the altar of poetic flourish or irresistible alliteration. A dead horse’s eye “sweeps back, glutinous and glib, into the carved head”. Her most powerful images are often the simplest, such as the recently circumcised boy who “holds his bitterness before him like a shield”. The opening pages’ lush and occasionally opaque formulations give way to a more fluid prose as the story advances.

The Age of Orphans is the first volume in a trilogy. At a time when western readers’ perceptions of Iran are too often shaped by current affairs, this book and its sequels will shine a necessary light on the country’s dawn, and on its people’s remarkable history.