Medusa Of The Roses, the debut novel by LA-based Iranian Navid Sinaki is a beautiful, engrossing twist on a modern love story complicated by broken trust, threat of persecution, and violence. Sinaki’s writing is vivid, effortless, and intimate, deftly building a world of Tehran’s queer urban networks and the introspective consciousness of the protagonist, Anjir, flashbacks, and the complexities of love and betrayal. 

Medusa Of The Roses, with its allegorical references to classicism and Greek mythology, and the hot, heady sensory depictions of beauty, presents the clandestine love affair of Anjir and Zal that has existed since childhood. After an event that threatens both Zal’s life and his relationship with Anjir. The couple decide that a gender transition, inspired by the myth of Tiresias, and leaving Tehran, could be the resolution they are seeking – until Zal vanishes and Anjir’s own existence is being followed.  

This book – which has been published by an equally boundary-breaking independent imprint – is a lucidly-written tale of love and desire called into question by all that surrounds it. Sinaki’s short, sharp, first novel breezes by in prose written at its very best, in a literary debut that that ought to be read far and wide.