AshehougAgency

Devil Girl

Ashraf grows up in a nice neighbourhood in Teheran, with no mother, but with a kind, but distanced father, a deeply religious and controlling grandmother and a young and immature stepmum. Her grandmother dubs her “Devil girl” because she is a cheerful and curious child whose behaviour, in the grandmother’s opinion, is not sufficiently seemly. Devil Girl tells the story of Ashraf’s life; her childhood, marriage and adultery in Teheran from the mid 40s, through the revolution and the war against Iraq, until the present. In a prose that effortlessly combines high and low, the realistic and the fantastic, Mina Bai describes a woman with strong urges and fierce vitality and her fate in a society characterized by oppression and superstition.

Praise for DEVIL GIRL:

“A powerful story of sensuality in Iran … A Norwegian ”A Thousand Splendid Suns”. Only much, much better … what makes Mina Bai’s novel far better than Hosseini’s is the prose, which oscillates between poetic high prose to oral slang, often within one and the same sentence.”
(Dagsavisen)

”A well written novel of dangerous love in Iran … poetic prose … amusing portraits of superstitions and absurdities … Letting a person’s life follow the political and cultural development is a good literary device … the text vibrates with erotic over- under undertones.”
(Dagbladet)

"A well told novel of current interest from the promising Norwegian-Iranian debutant Mina Bai ... a bold story of an outcast and erotically yearning woman in Teheran"
(VG)

First published: 2009, Forlaget Oktober
Mina Bai: Biography and bibiography