Escape from the Girls' Complex

Drought, sinking earth, fear, and pursuit have all conspired to unravel a city-where young women, stranded in a wasteland on the fringes of a sprawling metropolis, hemmed in by drought and refuse, live confined within a prison-like compound. They swallow fear to their core and weave dreams of escape, unaware that, for some time now, countless others across the great city have also been fleeing-hounded by agents or paralyzed by the dread of capture. In the end times of such a land, a quiet miracle stirs from within the walls of a crumbling house, now turned into a fortress-prison for girls abandoned by their families.

Mahboube Mousavi, a former teacher, is a writer and literary researcher from Neyshabur. She studied history at university, and her first literary activity was the publication of a children's story adapted from the "Zal and Simorgh" tale in the Shahnameh, titled A Bird, A Boy, which was published in 2002. She later collaborated with Khorasan publishers in the fields of translation and editing. In 2007, her first translation-a Persian version of Tuck Everlasting by Canadian author Natalie Babbitt-was published. Her debut novel, Silences, was initially released in 2012 through a joint effort between the Gutenberg House of Art and Literature and Arzan Publishing in Sweden. A few years later, it was published in Iran by Nashr Markaz in Tehran. A House Belonging to Another, a collection of two novellas, was also released by the same publisher. Set in a haunting and surreal atmosphere, the book addresses two fundamental human themes-death and eroticism-that, despite internal conflict, proceed side by side. Mousavi's short story collection The Dark Side is a selection and translation of stories from around the world, continuing her exploration of eerie and uncanny themes. Alongside teaching, she has translated several novels for various publishers, including the widely read The Girl on the Train, for which she delivered the first Persian translation to the market. In 2016, invited by the Austrian Literary Society and Bukhara magazine, her story The Blind Spot was read and translated at the Iran-Austria Writers' Night. This story was later included in her short story collection Revisiting Several Unintentional Crimes, which delves into unusual deaths occurring within the ordinary flow of life. Despite the independence of the stories, the collection is thematically unified, focusing on the minor crimes inherent in collective behavior. Her second novel, Rabbit and Ashes, is set in a realist context and explores women's longing for liberation from male dominance and their passion for life through art, affecting both women and men. Having lived in various regions across Iran, from the south to the north, Mousavi reflects these settings vividly in her stories-from war-torn Abadan in Silences to rainy Gilan in A Pair of Shoes and Revisiting..., and Khorasan in Rabbit and Ashes, as well as the outskirts of Tehran in Escape from the Girls' Complex.