Invoking classic myths, Navid Sinaki's sweetly sinister debut novel, Medusa of the Roses, conjures a pair of ill-fated lovers as timeless as Pyramus and Thisbe. Anjir and Zal live in Tehran, where their childhood friendship has flourished into a clandestine affair despite Zal's marriage to a woman named Mahtob. For his part, Anjir identifies with Tiresias, "the man from Greek mythology who turned into a woman simply by striking two snakes." The government in their country "[c]ould kill you for being gay, but will foot the bill if you agree to a sex change." Although they conspire for a future elsewhere, one in which Mahtob is out of the picture, Zal is attacked after visiting an underground gay club, leaving him hospitalized. Shortly afterward he disappears.
Sinaki writes Anjir's desire with a blade's edge, his longing for Zal complicated by the many betrayals between them, the utmost being that Zal was with another man when he was attacked. Yet as Anjir's menacing passion drives the noirish stakes from one murder plot to the next in his search for Zal, he discovers a pivotal friendship in Leyli, a wealthy trans woman considering government subsidies for surgery. "We meet somewhere in between our desires to be unbothered. Her as a woman, me as a lover...." From her he lifts pearls, hormone pills, and affectations necessary for "the role of [Zal's] new wife."
In Medusa of the Roses, every observation comes decorated with mordant humor ("Let's hope like Joan Crawford I die a bitch"). Its spellbinding story unfolds not as a myth retold but as a fresh legend for modern times. --Dave Wheeler, senior editor, Shelf Awareness