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Biography & Autobiography Personal Memoirs

Prisoner of Tehran

A Memoir

by (author) Marina Nemat

Publisher
Penguin Group Canada
Initial publish date
Apr 2008
Category
Personal Memoirs, Women, Iran
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780143052173
    Publish Date
    Apr 2008
    List Price
    $23.00

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Description

In 1982, 16-year-old Marina Nemat was arrested on false charges by Iranian Revolutionary Guards and tortured in Tehran's notorious Evin prison. At a time when most Western teenaged girls are choosing their prom dresses, Nemat was having her feet beaten by men with cables and listening to gunshots as her friends were being executed. She survived only because one of the guards fell in love with her and threatened to harm her family if she refused to marry him. Soon after her forced conversion to Islam and marriage, her husband was assassinated by rival factions. Nemat was returned to prison but, ironically, it was her captor's family who eventually secured her release. An extraordinary tale of faith and survival, Prisoner of Tehran is a testament to the power of love in the face of evil and injustice.

About the author

Arrested at age sixteen in Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran, Marina Nemat was imprisoned in Teheran’s notorious Evin prison for two years. She emigrated to Canada in 1991 and lives with her husband and two sons near Toronto.

Marina Nemat's profile page

User Reviews

Resilience in face of grief, loss of myriad kinds

Author and protagonist Marina Nemat quickly ushers you into a riveting account of her terrifying experiences during the Iranian revolution of the early 1980s. Her voice has the flat affect of someone battered and shell shocked, but strikingly determined to survive. While that voice is at times so strangely modest and understated as to be almost unnerving, you are irresistibly drawn into her harrowing tale of being arrested at the age of sixteen for acts so tenuously seditious to the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini as to be ridiculous. It is that ridiculousness that makes the physical and mental tortures she endures that much more nightmarish and incomprehensible. Read my full review at: http://bookgaga.posterous.com/prisoner-of-tehran-by-marina-nemat

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