Short listed for VAV Literary Award 2004
Short listed for Critics Literary Award 2004

Pourya, a student of linguistics who has lost his blind musician mother Anahita recently, believes that his real family history is not the same as the story he has been told by his parents. So he begins a challenge to find out the truth about his parents and his own past; a battle with the illusionary and manipulated reality that the society and his family have been imposing on him for many years. There are rays of truth that fall on young Pourya’s eyes, through the tiny holes in the illusionary walls of his routine life: he meets strange people he doesn’t know and never has met before, and they open for him the untold story of his parents, his nation, and his fellow human race: He meets an old man sitting beside the grave of his mother, whose name is Pourya as well, the love of his mother’s life, telling him the legend of a young man named Pourya, beginning a quest to find the beautiful Princess of the Land of Eternity, but on the way, he gets lost, and a masked girl escaping from the Land of Eternity finds him, and helps him pass through all the tests and ordeals on the way to the Land of Eternity, the Jungle of Fire, the Mountain of thorns, the field of Darkness, the Seven Headed Dragon, the Fiery Doorway, and the Garden of Roses. But when Pourya finds the Princess at last, he finds out that he is in love with the masked girl.
He also meets a strange old woman, Leila, who tells him about Pourya, the same old man he met beside the grave of his mother. When he was young, he was a junior editor in a Publishing House. His passion was to be a writer, but he never succeeded in writing anything. He lost his father in child-hood, and after a few adventures, like becoming a medical student and going to the front in the war between Iran and Iraq and coming back with horrible memories that has broken his will power down, he decided to put aside all the challenges and accept anything that life presented to him. But, then, he meets two persons. First, an old man named Khazraii, who is a writer and Pourya is in charge of edit-ing his story that happens to be The Princess of the Land of Eternity, and Anahita, a blind musician girl, who was Pourya’s best friend and neighbor in childhood, for whom Pourya used to tell his own stories, at the time he was not obsessed with writing stories, but telling them.
These two will not leave Pourya on himself, and won’t let him stay in the silence he has es-caped into. Pourya steals Khazraii’s story and retells it as his own story for Anahita. But to go on tell-ing stories, by the advice of the old Khazraii, he has to leave and find the ancient book, created at the same time of human race’s creation, that contains all the stories in the world, told or untold. So he has to decide between competing with the famous writer who is also in love with Anahita, or put eve-rything aside to find his own true history – or story.
Now the young student, trapped in a society that restricts individual and intellectual freedom, restricts all hopes for a better future, imposing routine and acceptance, and confused in his own rela-tionships, has to find a long but narrow path that links his past, present and future together.
The question of changing the past, unfolds the main concept of the story: Repetition. Every-thing is questionable. Mankind chooses among the stories that can be his past, and this choice, makes the wheel of history turn and go on. So every story repeats in different styles, and sometimes with different endings. The intermingling of these three stories, is trying to show the synchronization of all the events. The author does not believe that creation was completed on the sixth day. The creation is happening in every moment. Time is not linear; all the history is happening at the same time and the events of past, present and future have effects on each other. Even the past is not concrete and de-termined, and the author mentions “it is possible to change the past”, and he proves that one should not accept the told history for granted. There are many alternatives to any story, and all of them are true.
“… They want us to believe that there is only one past for us and we have no choice on them. But this determined past, has thousand and one variables. So I have thousand and one pasts, not one.”
And,
“…They say we Iranians have 6000 years of history. We are proud and arrogant. And now that we are a third world developing country, with a destroyed economy, and nothing to be proud of, we reconcile ourselves that we have had a great history, the empire of Persia, and we can be proud of ourselves. But is it true? Has our history been the same as they have been telling us? Our brilliant history, isn’t it something we wish we were, but we were not? Haven’t we thrown the Utopia from the future into the past?”

PRESS VOICES

The author [of the Princess of the Land of Eternity] knows how to write a good story, he chooses the words wisely, he puts the scenes together with utmost preci-sion, he introduces the characters skillfully, he uses appropriate suspense and all the tools for hooking up the reader to read every page. This novel is a strong, and beautiful story…

Hamshahri Newspaper 2003

The author takes the reader along his labyrinth of stories, like 1001 Nights [Arabian Nights], to prove that all the loves are the same, there is only one woman and one man, and the world is repeating itself endless, and without getting bored.

BBC Persian

Read the summary and first chapter here