Echoes Of Shiraz
by Jacob Averin
Two cities divided by history. Two musicians bound by a frequency only they can hear.
Tehran, 1976. A young Israeli woman follows her engineer husband to a city she does not yet know how to read. In the libraries and courtyards and long amber afternoons, she falls in love with a man she can never claim – and carries his memory, and a devastating secret, out of a country she will never be allowed to enter again.
Tel Aviv, 2024. Her daughter Shiraz is forty-six, a musician who plays the oud and sings in Persian modes she taught herself in secret. Between crowded buses and late-night studio sessions, she composes toward a silence at the center of her family – her mother’s fifty-year refusal to speak of Iran.
When Shiraz joins an underground music forum that connects musicians across the Iranian digital divide, she finds a setar player in Tehran whose work vibrates at the exact frequency she has lived in all her life. His name is Aran. For nine months they talk in encrypted messages and audio files, falling in love the way two instruments fall into resonance – completely, without deciding to.
Their first meeting, in Istanbul, changes everything. The music they make together is the best either of them has ever made. Then a folder appears, and a request, and a journey into a city Shiraz has never seen but has carried inside her since birth. What she finds there will shatter everything she thought she knew about her family, her lover, and herself.
Echoes of Shiraz is a novel about inheritance, music, and the silences that pass between mothers and daughters – about what love cannot always save, and what a daughter discovers when she finally listens to the thing her mother could never say.
On the Shur mode, fado, and the silences between notes that become the emotional grammar of a novel about inheritance and espionage.
How spy fiction is evolving from Cold War procedurals into something stranger, more interior, and more concerned with what intelligence work does to the people who carry its secrets home.
On the literary tradition of secrets between generations — and why the things a mother withholds become the architecture of her daughter’s identity.
Readers on Echoes Of Shiraz
“Couldn’t leave it until finished. Such a devastating secret to carry, both Mother and Daughter. Wow”.
“This has brought so many memories! Left Tehran more than 50 years ago. Still miss it deeply. Great book!”
“What tragic love stories. Secrets will always come out in the end. There’s nothing you can do about it. I recommend this book to mothers. and daughters”.
