In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran »

Christopher de Bellaigue was born in London and now lives in Tehran with his family. He has spent the past decade working as a journalist in the Middle East and South Asia, and his work appears in The Economist, the New York Review of Books, Granta, and The New Yorker.

The history of Iran in the late twentieth century is a chronicle of religious fervor and violent change — from the Islamic Revolution that ousted the Shah in favor of a rigid fundamentalist government to the bloody eight-year war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. But what happened to the hostage-takers, the suicidal holy warriors, the martyrs, and the mullahs responsible for the now moribund revolution? Is modern Iran a society at peace with itself and the world, or truly a dangerous spoke in the "Axis of Evil"?

Christopher de Bellaigue, a Western journalist married to an Iranian woman and a longtime resident of a prosperous suburb of Tehran, offers a stunning insider's view of a culture hitherto hidden from American eyes, and reveals the true hearts and minds of an extraordinary people.

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

Where Rose Garden is most powerful is in giving us impressionistic glimpses of everyday life in Iran. As a British journalist who writes for The Economist, The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, Mr. de Bellaigue experiences the suspicion of Westerners evinced by so many Iranians. He gripes about being suspected of being a British spy, and he complains about the culture's elaborate, seemingly hypocritical mores - like sanctioning "temporary marriages" and "prudential dissimulation" ("the right to lie about one's beliefs as long as the lie is in the wider interests of the faith.")