The Women's Prize for Fiction 2025: The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji is the best-written book on the shortlist
Read the opening pages below
I
A SECOND FACE
BITA
FOR A WEEK IT was a nonstop party of drugs and cartoons until an hour ago when I bailed my Auntie Shirin out of the Aspen jail after her arrest for attempted prostitution.
In the white Suburban taxi that bulldozed across the uneven snowy roads, she poked her head out the backseat window, avoiding my questions. Finally, she turned around, her cheeks pink and alive, and yelled in Persian for me to stop meddling: “Foozooli nakon!”
Back at our hotel, Auntie Shirin marched down the third-floor hallway in her five-inch-heel over-the-knee boots. She passed 3E without slowing down. “Not dealing with Houman’s kumbaya shit. Bita, my dear, my joon, I’m staying with you.”
I hovered the key card over the lock, and my door opened.
Thirty minutes later she walked out of my bathroom wearing a big white hotel robe, and a towel around her head. The steam rolling out the door smelled of sweet chemicals.
Shirin removed the towel and shook out her hair. She lay face down on the king bed, on top of the cloudlike duvet. We’d dubbed my room Club 3M. Me, her son Mo, and all the dipshit kids of our parents’ friends. They made mine the party room not because I was the life of the party but more the opposite—after Mom died last year we’d skipped the trip and could I really get into the spirit without a shove? For eleven years straight, since 1994, our friends and family had flown to Aspen from New York, L.A., and Houston, as if 1979 and the Islamic Revolution hadn’t happened. As if we were still the most important families in Iran, descended from the great ancient lines, although this was America and nobody cared. The locals hated us. Not openly, but they did. I imagined them like that Pace Picante commercial, cowboys mumbling “Get a rope” when they saw us in all black, buying a thousand dollars’ worth of caviar and champagne at the mom-and-pop market.
“Bita joon, fetch me a Fiji and a Marlboro Light.” Auntie Shirin turned her head to the side, her cheek against the white pillow. She raised her arm and pinched at the air. “Be a good girl and do as your auntie says.”
“Okay, sure,” I said and rolled my eyes. In Iran, before 1979, Auntie Shirin had chauffeurs and servants. Once she said to me, without an ounce of self-reflection, “Bita, even the chauffeurs talked about overthrowing the king. They drove me to the marches. They hated the Pahlavis nearly as much as me.”
Her thick, dark hair splayed out across the white sheets, like ink spilling out on paper. She was a mess and I hated her and I loved her too.
I pulled a cool blue bottle from the minibar and got a cigarette out of the pack in my poofy ski jacket, stuck it in my mouth and lit it on a matchbook from the Caribou Club. The printed gold antlers of the muscular animal rose up in silhouette on the black cardboard. This was the club where my aunt was arrested for attempted prostitution. I inhaled deeply from the cigarette, watching the salt-and-pepper tip turn red, before passing it to Shirin.
“Here you go,” I said, blowing out the first smoke. “Good girl,” Auntie Shirin said.
She brought it to her face, her deep maroon nails sparkling. She looked to the bedside table as if to say, Put the water there. So I did.
It was four a.m. and I was no longer high. Or drunk. Just tired and annoyed. I’d bailed Shirin out for ten thousand dollars and all she’d said when the cop brought her barefoot to the empty waiting area was “Thank you, Bita joon” and “I knew you’d answer. What a damn genius I was to call you first, my little lawyer-in-training. That was good practice for you. Houman would be going up the wall.”
Then the cop handed me a large plastic bag of her belongings along with her boots, which even he knew better than to stuff in with her purse.
Now on her back, Auntie Shirin lay like a puddle soaking into the ground. The smoke rose from her lips. “Don’t you dare knock on his door,” she said, meaning her husband passed out in another room along the third floor.
I sat down in the tufted floral armchair next to the bed. On the TV, the newsman stood in a blizzard of white snow, in his black coat, breathing out white air. I pressed mute.
“They treated me like a common criminal. I’m disgusted,” Auntie Shirin said and filled her throat again with smoke.
“Did they read you your rights? They search you?” I asked.
“Are you kidding? A horrible slob stuck her hand in my ass. I’m going to sue them, you know.”
“Why don’t we just focus on getting the charges dropped, Auntie? This isn’t a joke—do you want a criminal record? Prison time? These charges can be serious. Think about your business—you’re the face of Valiat Events, aren’t you?” My voice grew high and slightly shaky.
She widened her eyes, ash building on her cigarette. “Mashallah, Bita,” she said. “For an Ivy League law student, you’re pretty fucking wimpy.”
I looked away at the silent TV, the news always on. It was pretty hypocritical that she invoked allah, given that nobody in our circle actually thought of ourselves as Muslim. Although some ancestor once made the Hajj, circled that big black box and was known for doing so.
“You owe me,” I said. “I could have left you shivering on a vinyl mattress until all the Persians came in and roasted you like a marshmallow.”
“Attagirl,” she said and smiled.
I rolled my eyes. “You’re a jerk, Auntie. This is bad, even for you. At least you didn’t go through with it. Right?” I pictured Shirin under a big blob of man, giving herself to him. “How did this even happen? Didn’t he approach you? I don’t get it.”
“That pig. That stupid officer fuckface posing as a Dallas playboy,” Auntie Shirin said, as she ashed her cigarette onto the floor.
“Do you think they targeted you?”
“For what? Being beautiful?”
I laughed and shook my head. “People from Iran are always a menace. One day we are hostage takers and hairy terrorists, the next we are a nuclear threat or a woman of ill repute.”
She stared at me, daring me to continue, but I said nothing.
“He said, ‘Baby, be my Cleopatra for the night. I want to be your sheik.’ I’ve had it up to here with that shit. So I said, ‘Okay, honey, I can be your Princess Jasmine, but it’s gonna cost you. Gimme fifty Gs.’ Bastard.” Shirin narrowed her eyes, her oily black lashes folding together. I laughed.
“Where did you come up with that amount?”
“I’m worth twice that at least,” she said. She stretched her arms out in a yawn, pushing against the headboard with her cigarette hand.
“Watch it,” I said. Ash scattered behind her head.
Auntie Shirin dropped her cigarette into the bottle full of water. “They’re so uneducated,” she said. “Everyone’s a fucking Arab. They don’t know anything about the Persians, that we were the greatest civilization on Earth. Let alone that our family in particular is something to behold. So then he said, ‘Okay, baby, just walk with me to the ATM.’ I’m no idiot. I know an ATM isn’t going to give you that kind of money. So I said, ‘You’re full of shit.’ He took out a checkbook and wrote me a check and gave me his entire wallet as collateral. I was going to do it, you know.”
“It was a trap,” I said. “But you’re right. All they saw was woman with dark skin.”
“What dark skin?” She looked at one arm and then the other. “No, no.”
“Oh please,” I said.
“This guy just wanted to humiliate me. He hates beautiful women.”
I scanned the dining table. Ketel One, a mirror taken from the wall, rolled-up dollar bills, Gore-Tex gloves, torn-up ski passes with mangled wires, green soy sauce packets and used chopsticks from Sushi Olé. On the carpet, the shiny hard shells of kicked-off ski boots. Black-on-black Prada shopping bags. Half-drunk Fijis, red-lipstick-kissed necks.
“And those opium-smoking dumbasses,” Shirin continued. “They won’t find out. Let them play their silly games.”
She meant the men, like her husband, Houman, and my dad, Teymour, who sat playing cards at their round table covered in green felt brought rolled up in someone’s luggage. In their room, the air would smell of mixed smoke—sweet, earthy, and floral, crystal tumblers of scotch shining like stars against the soft, green sky.
“When you were in the shower I called Patty to see if she could help. Her old professor knows some lawyers out in Denver. I told her to be discreet. I know you wouldn’t want word to get around.”
“I don’t need your lawyers, but fine, if you insist, I’ll take their call.”
“Don’t do me any favors, Auntie,” I said.
“And who’s this Patty? Why would you call her so early in the morning? Shame on you.”
“A friend,” I said, tipping my head back and staring at the air vent. Gray dust clung to the slats, like petri-dish fur.
More information on the book (US and Canada) »
The UK and Ireland »
Shortlist for the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction
Good Girl by Aria Aber
All Fours by Miranda July
The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji
Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis
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