3 Review(s)

In the shadow of Iran's rising unrest, Azar, a young caregiver in Tehran, quietly navigates a life suspended between duty and yearning. Haunted by memories and burdened with unspoken dreams, she longs for escape—especially to Portugal, a land of imagined freedom and forgotten songs. But Azar is not bound to just one reality. In the silence of her grief, she slips into alternate worlds: as the mournful voice of Amália Rodrigues, Portugal’s queen of Fado, and as a cloistered girl living three centuries earlier, in a Lisbon trembling before its devastating quake. Woven with eerie beauty and lyrical melancholy, this haunting novel explores identity, exile, and the fragile line between dreams and memory. From the Deterioration of the Chrysanthemum Garden is a tale of resistance—in the face of repression, in the echo of music, and in the timelessness of sorrow.