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  • Published: 15 May 2010
  • ISBN: 9780812977905
  • Imprint: Random House US Group
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $32.99

Honeymoon in Tehran

Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran




For readers of Kabul Beauty School and Funny in Farsi, the unforgettable story of a young American journalist who falls in love and starts a family in Iran.

Azadeh Moaveni, longtime Middle East correspondent for Time magazine, returns to Iran to cover the rise of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Living and working in Tehran, she finds a nation that openly yearns for freedom and contact with the West but whose economic grievances and nationalist spirit find an outlet in Ahmadinejad’s strident pronouncements. And then the unexpected happens: Azadeh falls in love with a young Iranian man and decides to get married and start a family in Tehran. Suddenly, she finds herself navigating an altogether different side of Iranian life. As women are arrested for “immodest dress” and the authorities unleash a campaign of intimidation against journalists, Azadeh is forced to make the hard decision that her family’s future lies outside Iran. Powerful and poignant, Honeymoon in Tehran is the harrowing story of a young woman’s tenuous life in a country she thought she could change.

  • Published: 15 May 2010
  • ISBN: 9780812977905
  • Imprint: Random House US Group
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $32.99

About the author

Azadeh Moaveni

Azadeh Moaveni is a journalist, writer, and academic who has been covering the Middle East for nearly two decades. She started reporting in Cairo in 1999 while on a Fulbright fellowship to the American University in Cairo. For the next several years she reported from throughout the region as Middle East correspondent for Time magazine, based in Tehran, and also covering Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Iraq. She is the author of Lipstick Jihad and Honeymoon in Tehran, and the co-author, with Nobel Peace Laureate Shirin Ebadi, of Iran Awakening. In November 2015 she published a front-page article in The New York Times on ISIS women defectors that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist as part of the Times’s ISIS coverage. Her writing appears in The Guardian, The New York Times, and The London Review of Books. She teaches journalism at NYU in London, is a former New America Fellow, and is now senior gender analyst at the International Crisis Group.

Praise for Honeymoon in Tehran

  • "At once personal and trustworthy...Moaveni's depiction of Iranian society, her keen eye for detail and her astute observations make for exhilarating reading." --The Washington Post
  • "An indelible portrait of the author's family and a highly personal picture of Iran's social and political evolution." --The New York Times
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