Symphony of the Dead
By Abbas Maroufi
Aflame Books £8.99, 272 pages
FT bookshop price: £7.19

In this print-on-demand age, it’s remarkable how much writing still fails to cross international borders. Abbas Maroufi’s first novel, Symphony of the Dead, was published in Iran in 1988, and immediately acclaimed as a masterpiece. But this new translation marks his Anglo-Saxon debut. Only in Germany, where Maroufi has lived in exile since 1996, after being accused of “insulting eminent revolutionaries and Islamic values”, has this book been rendered from Farsi.