Or he at least wants it to look that way. His professional life in the Iranian hinterlands is full of bureaucratic drudgery -- protecting dams, for example, from looters. His wife Fariba can no longer stand it, and has left him to rejoin her family in Isfahan. She is anxious for him to choose a life with her, or to let her go and persist with things as they are. But Kamran's issues run deeper than anybody imagines.

Rituals of Restlessness won the 2004 Golshiri Foundation Award for the best novel of the year and was named one of the ten best novels of the decade by the Press Critics Award in Iran. However, in 2007 Yaghoub Yadali was sentenced to one year in prison for having depicted an adulterous affair in the novel. Rituals of Restlessness and his short story collection Sketches in the Garden have been banned from publication and reprint in Iran. This book is the first for Phoneme Media's City of Asylum Imprint, which showcases books by current and former writers‐in‐residence at the Pittsburgh‐based nonprofit.