The Moonlit Rose of Isfahan (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781775308959)

Isfahan, 1980. In the shadow of war, Reza and Zahra have been married for exactly three weeks when their fragile new love is torn apart. As Saddam Hussein's forces invade Iran, Reza-a poet who dreams in verses of Hafez-is drafted to the frontlines, leaving behind his bride and the jasmine-scented garden that was meant to be their sanctuary.

What follows are eight years that will test whether love can survive separation, trauma, and the crucible of war.

In their modest home, Zahra transforms waiting into resistance. She reads Reza's letters-ink-smudged, blood-stained, written from trenches-until the paper threatens to disintegrate. She tends their roses even as bombs fall on neighboring cities. She cooks for displaced families at the mosque while her own soul hungers for the husband she barely had time to know. Each act of care becomes a vow: I will keep our love alive until you return.

On the frontlines, Reza clings to memories of her touch as the only beauty in a landscape of death. Amid the horrors of gas attacks and artillery fire, thoughts of Zahra are what keep him human-even as he watches his beloved brother Hossein die in his arms, even as shrapnel tears through his body, even as he loses comrade after comrade to a war that seems endless.

Isfahan, 1988. When the ceasefire finally comes, Reza returns home a ghost in a soldier's uniform-gaunt, grey-threaded, haunted by nightmares that won't release him. Zahra is no longer the innocent twenty-year-old bride but a woman forged by years of solitude into quiet strength. In the garden where jasmine still blooms despite everything, they face the most difficult battle yet: learning to love each other again.

Through tender, playful nights of rediscovery and dark hours when war's trauma threatens to destroy what they're rebuilding, Reza and Zahra discover that surviving war is one thing-learning to truly live again is another. Woven with the timeless poetry of Hafez and Rumi, The Moonlit Rose of Isfahan is an epic love story set against one of the 20th century's most devastating conflicts-a testament to love's power to endure, to heal, and to bloom even in the ashes of war.