The Lion Women of Tehran
The Lion Women of Tehran (2024) by Marjan Kamali, follows the lives of two girls who come of age in 1960s and 70s Tehran. Wealthy Ellie and middle class Homa, become unlikely best friends in 1950s Iran when tragedy moves Ellie and her mother from an affluent neighborhood downtown. The two girls, age seven, become fast friends and are all but inseparable until, years later, Ellie’s mother moves she and Ellie out of the neighborhood in an attempt to give Ellie a better life. The girls’ fates, however, are intertwined as Iran faces revolution and authoritarian rule. The Lion Women of Tehran follows the girls’ friendship and lives and is told in various timelines. Kamali’s novel explores themes of friendship, betrayal, and forgiveness against the backdrop of Iran from the 1950s to the post-pandemic world.
The Lion Women of Tehran braids strands of the same story together, layering different times and perspectives, ultimately plaiting a single narrative. Readers meet the two childhood friends through Ellie’s memory years later. The girls age. In time they face brutal realities of a world harsher than either of them knew, and life ultimately takes them in different directions. One girl escapes the spiraling reality of her native Iran, while the other remains. The Lion Women of Tehran is about deep friendship, the curse of the evil eye, unintentional betrayal, and the all-too-human inability to forgive ourselves. The love of country and ideals is as strong in Homa as the love of a man is in Ellie; those loves eventually divide them. But their love of one another binds them together, even when time and distance separate them. The Lion Women of Tehran examines the intense connections that can take root between individuals, and the ways those connections can change both of their lives forever.
Beyond the human stories at the heart of Kamali’s novel is the heartbreaking story of Iran’s last fifty years. The Lion Women of Tehran fictionalizes the very real experiences of women in Iran from the 1960s through to contemporary time. Western readers witness the complicated processes through which Iran’s increasingly progressive government (under the last Shah) gave way to the conservative rule of Ayatollah Khomeini as those changes directly impact the novel’s heroines and their families. Political imprisonments, devastating massacres, and the dissolution of women’s rights all play a part in the story. Ellie and Homa live through the changes in very different ways, and their lives are both shaped by them. In fact, it is the continued deterioration of Iranian women’s freedoms that winds Homa and Ellie back together, despite old betrayal and distance. This novel is a celebration of Iran’s rich history, the Persian language and culture (including its food), the ferocity of its lion women. The Lion Women of Tehran ends in hope as one generation ages and another matures. As such, The Lion Women of Tehran reinforces the determined call for freedom for Iran’s women still raised by activists from inside the country and across the globe. This is book well-worth the read. It is a journey through time and place, and a delight for the senses.
Kamala, Marjan. The Lion Women of Tehran. Gallery Books: 2024.
