Half a Cup of Sand and Sky

September 25, 2023
Rich with longing, heartbreak, romance, and intrigue, Bjursten’s standout debut centers on Amineh, a bright young girl eager to avoid the spotlight but who finds herself caught in the tumultuous events sweeping toward the Iranian revolution. In 1977, amid student protests, Amineh, a student of Persian literature, strives to focus on her studies even as the University of Tehran is convulsed in conflict, at a moment when poets and writers, now “tired of metaphor,” dare to speak out for freedom and human rights. “The air around her felt charged, as if something new was hiding in its folds,” Bjursten writes, but for Amineh that charge isn’t just the fervor for change. She has met Farzad, a well-meaning man who is afraid of becoming his father but at the same time committed to fighting for a better country.
With sweeping details and a life-drawn story full of political unrest, murder, and romantic uncertainty, Bjursten immerses readers in a life, a nation, and an era. Amineh is a loving, relatable protagonist, striving to fit in, to write her parent’s story in a novel, and then to survive as a wife and mother performing her duties even as “her inner world flattened.” Her perceptions illuminate a fractious, world-altering moment too rarely dramatized in English but also its complex fallout and the challenges, especially for a woman, of finding fulfillment afterwards. The novel sweeps across decades, attentive to the textures of life and hard compromises, but Bjursten moves the story briskly, and the slight romantic undertones provide relief.
Bjursten’s prose is clear, polished, and touched with poetry and insight but never getting in the way of the heart of the story: a woman fighting for her family, love, and freedom from political injustice. Well-drawn characters and a tangible sense of living through history will grip readers of realistic and historical fiction, especially as Amineh dares to tell her own story. The final pages will bring tears.
Takeaway: Powerful novel of regret, love, loss, and the Iranian revolution.
Comparable Titles: Susanne Pari’s In the Time of Our History, Shahrnush Parsipur.
Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A