We Were Almost Happy is a collection of short stories by Mohammad Ali Talebi to be published by Asemana Books on October 23, 2026.
ISBN: 9781997503538
Language: Persian
We Were Almost Happy is a collection of interconnected stories that follows the life of a boy from childhood to early adulthood in Iran before and after the 1979 Revolution.
The book offers an unflinching account of poverty, love, friendship, family, fear, repression, personal aspirations, emotional and physical needs, and the search for identity within a traditional and deeply contradictory society.
With honesty and, at times, painful candor, the author explores aspects of his own life that he was never able to express in his films. The characters and events in this book are real, and many of the stories are drawn directly from lived experience and personal memory.
Yet We Were Almost Happy is more than the story of one individual. It is a portrait of a generation of Iranians who came of age between tradition and modernity, freedom and restriction, dreams and reality—and who carried the wounds and memories of those years with them for the rest of their lives.
