‘Death to Freedom, Death to Captivity’.

In this darkly satirical tale, a beautiful young Iranian woman carries a placard bearing these contradictory words to a student protest, putting fear and distrust into the minds of agitators on all sides. What does she mean? Whose side is she on? The farce at the core of the novel is the unfortunate nature of a country that is so deeply at war with itself, it doesn’t recognise her challenge to them all.

Censoring is narrated by a contemporary writer who attempts to reignite the passion and beauty of Iranian literature and culture by writing a Booker-prize-winning Iranian love story. But getting it past the censors will be almost impossible: the nature of romance requires much more intimacy between his young lovers than is currently acceptable. In this multi-layered, postmodern tale, each page is full of crossed-out lines and notes to his audience in which he decries the politicisation of art. He mourns a society where the difference between freedom and captivity is so tenuous, and a rich cultural history that produced such classic texts as The Tales of A Thousand and One Nights has been lost.