** 'Censoring an Iranian Love Story is intriguing even before its first page ... An absorbing and unique novel with a depth of feeling for words and stories in Iran' The Scotsman ** 'A playful tale ... Censoring an Iranian Love Story is a brilliant novel about the complexities of writing and publishing in Iran' Guardian ** 'The absurdities of life in the Islamic Republic of Iran provide frequent moment of hilarity ? typical of political satires in the tradition of Milan Kundera ... Censoring an Iranian Love Story in both context and style gives us a timely glimpse of the complex and infuriatingly paradoxical society that is today's Iran ... Mandanipour has the potential to create a genre of Persian literature that could breach the gap in literary sensibilities that separates readers from vastly different traditions' Irish Times ** 'A marvellous tale ... This is a writer intoxicated with the possibilities of language, and his timely, well-translated book is about a potent love affair, not only with women, but also with words' New Statesman ** 'This important, timely novel is sharp, playful and zesty with life' Daily Mail ** 'This is a very special novel ... passionate, inventive and humorous' The Times ** 'It's a powerful, provocative and timely novel' Observer ** 'I absolutely loved Censoring an Iranian Love Story. Insightful and sensual, humorous and sly, allegorical and literary, it is an endless pleasure: a celebration of love and the written word from a part of the world where both still matter' Gary Shteyngart, author of Absurdistan ** 'Mandanipour's writing is exuberant, clever, profuse with puns and literary-political references; the reader might easily think of the Rushdie of Midnight's Children... Charming, inventive, playfully alive' James Wood, THE NEW YORKER ** 'Darkly comic ... A novel about two young Iranians trying to conduct a romance in Tehran and a Kundera-like rumination on philosophy and politics [that] investigates the possibilities and limits of storytelling ... Haunting' Michiko Kakutani, NEW YORK TIMES

Shahriar Mandanipour was born in 1957 in Shiraz and has had fiction and non-fiction published in Iran, although his work was banned between 1992 and 1998; he is regarded as one of Iran's most accomplished and successful writers. He is currently a visiting scholar at Harvard.