This is a captivating journey through modern Iran and Afghanistan that sheds light on present-day conflicts by tapping the most surprising of sources - a thousand-year-old epic poem. Iran and Afghanistan - two modern countries so overtaken by Islamic fundamentalism that many citizens spend their entire lives hiding what they do, enjoy, and value. To better understand the cultural issues and paradoxes facing Iranians and Afghans today, Nicholas Jubber travels from the underground dance parties of Tehran to the opium dens of Afghanistan’s Helmand province. Along the way he discovers traces of a vibrant, pre-Islamic Persian culture still alive and well, and with each encounter he is increasingly drawn back to an unlikely source-Ferdosi, the father of Persian culture, whose 11th-century epic, the Shahnameh ( Book of Kings ) becomes both Jubber’s window into the region’s past and his link to its tumultuous present.