In her non-fiction book entitled “I am alive” Masume Abad recollects the days she spent as a captive. During the Iran-Iraq war in 1980-1988 she and three other Iranian girls were sent to one of the scariest prisons of the Ba’ath regime. For forty months they were tortured in most infernal ways, physically and morally. They didn’t see the light of the sun for many months, they didn’t know what happened to their families, yet they held out. They were lucky to come back home, but the memories of those hideous days have been haunting them for thirty years. 

The book “I am alive” recently issued with the support of the Islamic Culture Research Foundation is the first one in the new series of the Sadra publishing house, “War prose”. This attention to 8-year-long Iran-Iraq war is no coincidence. In the modern Iranian literature the war prose represents a separate and distinct dimension, as many authors describing the events of  those days fought on the front line.