<p>These evocative short stories put together in historical order, present a vivid mosaic of the dramatic, comic, lyrical, and tragic. Spanning 100 years, the tales are wonderfully diverse &ndash; a young girl is forced to marry a feudal lord much older than her, a village dandy falls in love with a beautiful woman in a foreign land, the treacherous role played by the people of Tehran when the democratically elected government of Dr Mosaddegh was overthrown by the help of the CIA, young boys in a remote village are asked to take part in horrific, absurd and comical religious ceremonies and festivals, a little boy who becomes intensely preoccupied with the secret lives of marionettes, a deeply religious adolescent who fails to have sex with a prostitute, a woman who is banned from singing under Sharia Law, a pigeon-fancier who falls in love with a young woman whose fanatic family cause a lot of problems for him &ndash; but together these tales create a sense of separate destinies entwined across time and space.</p>