Audiobooks Narrated by Ashraf Shirazi

The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club: Surviving Iran's Most Notorious Prisons in 16 Recipes

"How do you cheer up a woman who has spent hours cleaning prison toilets with a broken mop? The secret is in a tres leches cake. In Iran’s prisons, women endure horrors: they are beaten, interrogated, and humiliated in a thousand ways. Even a whisper to a fellow inmate can be punished. Yet—in spite of anything and everything—they resist: they bake. They console each other, cry together, dance together. Sepideh Gholian, in prison since 2018, bakes scones for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s daughter, a pumpkin pie for Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi, and madeleines for Marzieh Amiri, serving time for a May Day demonstration in 2019. The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club is a call to stand up for women, life, and freedom, by a woman still fighting for a free Iran."

Sepideh Gholian (Author), Ashraf Shirazi (Narrator)

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Titan of Tehran: From Jewish Ghetto to Corporate Colossus to Firing Squad - My Grandfather's Life

"The titan is Habib Elghanian—a self-made industrialist and the foremost Jew of his time in Iran, whom the Islamic theocracy targeted as the first civilian executed during the 1979 revolution. With Iran continuing to generate front-page news, his previously untold story is painfully relevant, shedding light on that country's persistent economic, political and social problems. The odyssey of Elghanian's life and death is told by his granddaughter in an understated style that nonetheless makes clear her powerful stake and personal place in the unfolding drama. Exploring universal themes of loss and longing, belonging and identity, she reconstructs and chronicles his ascent from Tehran's Jewish quarter—'the edge of the pit'—to his business success that was instrumental in modernizing the country to fatefully facing a firing squad. Titan of Tehran serves as a monument to a man who might have disappeared in the mists of history, even though his execution was reported worldwide on newspaper front pages and in broadcast news reports. In his homeland, Elghanian was misrepresented, mistreated, maligned, and murdered—but now won't be forgotten. He is a riveting character whom listeners will keep in their hearts—a titan, yes, but deeply, sadly, delightfully human, too."

Shahrzad Elghanayan (Author), Ashraf Shirazi (Narrator)

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