They are 28 years old and they live in Tehran. Leyla, Shabaneh and Rodja all have an engineering degree, but they dream of something else. Of a life that is not “ordinary”. They seek happiness and wonder if it might not be found elsewhere.

Rodja struggles to fill out her papers to emigrate to France, while Leyla, alone in her apartment, mourns the departure of her husband, who has gone to settle in Canada. Shabaneh, she does not know what she wants, not daring to break up with the man who wants to marry her and whom she is not sure to love.

“We are no longer from the same world as our mothers, but we are not yet from that of our daughters,” Rodja said. We are torn apart. They embody a generation caught in between, to whom the possibilities offered fail to satisfy ambitions; unhappy because they are unable to make what they see as impossible decisions between “bad, worse, and even worse.”

This novel written in 2014 had a great success in Iran. The author, who is also a screenwriter and journalist, does not seek to criticize society, of which we nevertheless feel, between the lines, the weight of obligations. She let the voices of these three women flow freely to express, each in their own way, sorrows, fears and longings that are nonetheless fundamentally universal. And the portrait she paints gives us a glimpse of this Iran stuck between tradition and the West that turns out to be just as captivating as an Asghar Farhadi film.