Rosewater

As he was leaving London in 2009 to cover Iran’s presidential election, Maziar Bahari told his pregnant fiancée, Paola, that he’d return in just a few days, a week at most. He little knew that he would spend three months in Iran’s most notorious prison, enduring brutal interrogation sessions at the hands of a man whose smell he knew only too well: Rosewater. For the Bahari family, wars, coups, and revolutions were not distant concepts but intimate realities they had suffered for generations: Maziar’s father had been imprisoned by the shah in the 1950s and his sister by Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1980s. Alone in his cell at Evin Prison fearing the worst, Maziar drew strength from his memories of their courage—hearing their voices speak to him across the years.