Sanam Mahloudji talks to Tash Aw

Sanam Mahloudji was born in Tehran and grew up in Los Angeles after leaving Iran during the Islamic Revolution. Her fiction has won a Pushcart Prize. She discusses her first novel with the Malaysian author of Five Star Billionaire, Tash Aw, winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award and twice longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

A riotously funny and moving debut, The Persians follows five women from three generations of a once illustrious Iranian family as their lives are turned upside down. In Iran, they were somebodies. In America, they’re nobodies. Can they restore the family name to its former glory? And what does that mean in a country where they never mattered to anyone?