In the tradition of storytellers throughout time, Pirooz Jafari’s Forty Nights is a wonderous, lyrical journey across time and landscape. A photographer turned lawyer Jafari can now confidently add writer to his resume with this tale that moves deftly between 1360s Sweden, 1980s Iran and present-day Australia.

The central character, Tishtar, runs a small legal practice in Melbourne. A new client, Habiba, seeks to bring her orphan nieces to Australia from war-torn Somalia. As Tishtar learns of his client’s traumatic experiences in her devastated home country, he is confronted by the memories of his own childhood experience of a battle-weary homeland in Iran. He seeks to marry the nostalgia and comfort of family life with the terror brought about by warmongers and politics.

Themes of dislocation and displacement run throughout each of the stories, and through our connection with the characters Jafari asks us to reframe our thinking about those who seek asylum, no matter the cause. You can taste and smell the richness of each setting, which could not be more different from the other.

This is a challenging book to describe or compartmentalise as beneath the poetry of the prose simmers the hurt, pain, and trauma of everyone who has been forced to leave their home and this is a present force throughout. The stories stayed with me long after I closed the pages.

Reviewed by Maryanne Vagg

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in Iran, Pirooz Jafari migrated to Australia more than two decades ago as an ambitious photographer. His experience of witnessing violations of human rights of every imaginable kind throughout his childhood, adolescence and young adult life in Iran ignited a passion in him to pursue legal studies and Pirooz graduated as a lawyer in Australia in the summer of 2003.

Pirooz has since worked in various community-based organisations and statutory bodies. Forty Nights is his first literary fiction novel.