☰The Colonel

Dowlatabadi's brooding novel follows a retired colonel in an unnamed Iranian city — widely understood to be set in the period after the 1979 revolution — as he deals with the deaths of his children, each a casualty of Iran's modern history from different political directions. Bleak and powerful, it is one of the defining works of contemporary Persian literature. Though not set in Isfahan specifically, it illuminates the weight of Iranian history that saturates a city like this one.