Juliet Syndrome
Translated from the Persian by Amir Sepahram
In a future Tehran where love is manufactured, marketed, and sold under contract, one detective's investigation into a young woman's death uncovers a conspiracy that reaches the very top of the city's most powerful love corporation.
A century and a half after the Year of Poison remade the city, love stopped being a feeling and became a product: engineered, matched, and delivered through hormone therapy that begins with the first injections of puberty. Who gets to love depends entirely on which side of Tehran you're born on. In the manicured towers of East Tehran, the wealthy buy love on contract and call it progress. In West Tehran, millions live crammed into the sprawl the corporations left behind. There, suicide and addiction rise every year, and a love contract is something people long for but can never afford.
When a burned-out detective takes on the case of a young woman's suicide, the trail leads him to an underground resistance fighting to keep one kind of love, the natural kind, off the market for good.
Part detective noir, part dystopian romance, this novel from acclaimed Iranian speculative fiction writer Zoha Kazemi is written for readers drawn to forbidden love under an authoritarian regime and to the underground fight for what can't be bought.
Kazemi's future Tehran is richly layered. It is a city rebuilt after catastrophe, where fertility centers under international sanctions and imported embryos decide who may become a parent. Its resistance hides its messages inside the country's own poetic tradition: lines of Hafez, Rumi, and Saadi are repurposed as code, alongside a hand-annotated copy of Shakespeare. The result blends classical poetry and speculative fiction in a way the genre rarely attempts.
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