'This enthralling account...confirms my conviction, learned from experience, that idealism does not die. Indeed, the human spirit can still triumph, however brutal the tyranny under which so many are destined to live out their lives'

'Once upon a time, long before fatwas and ayatollahs, the daughter of a shazdeh, or prince, grew up in a Tehran harem. Sattareh lived with numerous mothers, more than 30 siblings and some thousand servants...Sattareh's father may have been autocratic, infuriatingly stingy and over 60 at the time of her birth, but he was also unusually enlightened. His motto "education is everything" applied as much to daughters as to sons. It paid off, for Sattareh provides an accomplished portrait of a childhood enriched by nightingales and bazaars, politics and family romances. More impressively, she broke with tradition to study in California, returned to found the Tehran School of Social Work and, after the Shah's downfall, survived execution by a whisker'

'Her memories of her childhood...are lyrical and enchanting...beautifully written'

'A wonderful book to read and own; a treasury of human experience'