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An Excerpt | What Others are Saying



  		• Co-op available
  		• National print reviews
  		• Mailings, ads, internet promotion to large Iranian populations in Los Angeles and other cities
  		• 15-city author tour: Houston; Los Angeles; Miami; Dallas; Fort Worth; Austin; Galveston; San Antonio; Atlanta; Washington, D.C.; Memphis; Sarasota; Jacksonville; New York City; San Francisco
  		• For fans of The Kite Runner
    		 The Quince Seed Potion
    A Novel
    Morteza Baharloo


    The Quince Seed Potion, set against the backdrop of Iran's turbulent modern history, is a saga of an indentured servant's devotion and love for his masters during the years 1928 to 1981. The changes in the fortunes of the protagonist, Sarveali Jokar, as he dedicates his life to serving the Shirlu khans, great rural landowners and farmers, mirror the changes in Iran and the disintegration of the wealth and power of the family dynasty as the Islamic Revolution of 1979 unfolds.

    Sarveali, like his country, experiences violence and humiliation, recounted in a series of episodes reminiscent of Tales of the Arabian Nights. In the face of contempt and cruelty, he remains loyal to his masters, the only family he ever knows, through their own travails. His homoerotic affection for his favorite master and boyhood companion, Teimour Khan, although rejected, sustains Sarveali through the years. His adventures, including marriage to a cousin, her repeated promiscuity and eventual murder, his opium addiction and imprisonment, recall the ups and downs of Voltaire’s Candide. As the Khans are forced into exile or assassinated and Iran is transformed from a monarchy to an Islamic state, the reader is asked to decide if Sarveali's selfless life is totally tragic or suggests a kind of redemption for both the servant and his country.

    Morteza Baharloo was born in Iran in 1961, emigrated to the U.S. in 1978, and now lives in Houston, Texas. He is chairman and co-founder of Healix, Ltd., a 400-employee international provider of pharmaceutical and health-care services, based in Texas. He returns periodically to Iran, where he is restoring rural estates built by his grandfather and great uncles in the 1920s.


    The household cock crowed, heralding the exact moment when darkness surrendered to dawn, just as two tiny limbs emerged from the laboring woman's dark orifice. The semi-somnolence of Fatima, the Bald Doula, shattered. “I see them!” she yelled. “I see them! I see them!” she repeated, as if competing with the noisy cock. The collective shouting of the female spectators blended with the painful cries of the woman now deep in labor, and the clamor of preadolescent girls who were present to observe their own procreative destinies. As the neighboring cocks crowed in concert, the doula turned her attention from the spectators in the cramped room to the laboring woman. What the doula saw terrified her.