Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith

Name: Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith
ISBN: 9781508493662

A Novel

Gina B. Nahai

The first voice we hear in Gina B. Nahai's second novel is that of Lili, the grown daughter of a miraculous mother. When Lili was five years old and living in the Jewish ghetto of Tehran, her mother, Roxanna, "had grown wings, one night when the darkness was the color of her dreams, and flown into the star-studded night of Iran that claimed her." Thirteen years would pass, Lili informs us, before she would find her mother again.

This short introduction serves as a framing device for the story of Roxanna's life, a life begun as a "bad-luck" child. According to her sister, Miriam the Moon, she "had been a runaway before she ever became a wife or a mother, before she came into existence or was even conceived."

About the Author

Gina B. Nahai is an Iranian-American novelist, born in Tehran and raised partly in Switzerland before settling in Los Angeles. She is a best-selling author and emeritus professor of creative writing at the University of Southern California, where she taught fiction writing and publishing for 16 years. Her novels have been translated into 18 languages and have been named "One of the Best Books of the Year" by the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, with several as finalists for the Orange Award, the IMPAC Award, and the Harold J. Ribalow Award. Her novels include Cry of the Peacock, Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, Sunday's Silence, Caspian Rain, and The Luminous Heart of Jonah S., and her fiction often draws on the history of Iran's Jewish community and the experience of exile