Women Without Men

Paperback · 128 pages · Penguin Classics · Translated by Faridoun Farrokh · Published March 2026

Five women in a garden that cannot save them

Munis has left the brother who buried her; Fa'iza arrives with violation inside the marriage plot she still wants; Zarrinkolah has walked out of the brothel; Mahdokht has fled the body; Farrokhlaqa owns the garden without being released by it.

In Shahrnush Parsipur's Women Without Men, the garden at Karaj receives women who have run out of sanctioned lives. Set against 1950s Iran and the political unease of the coup period, the book moves in fable's compression. Domestic authority and bodily transformation share the same space. The garden gathers escape. It cannot complete it.

Munis is controlled through ignorance. The household kept her ignorant about her own body, then punished her for not knowing. Her brother's authority depends on her not knowing her own body. Once that ignorance breaks, punishment follows. Death breaks the family's script, but the body has already been treated as disposable. Her return gives her literacy, speech and movement. She comes back less as a miracle than as a woman no longer available to the rules that killed her.

Mahdokht takes purity past social virtue into disappearance. She cannot bear sex as ordinary fact, so she chooses removal: roots, seed, dispersal, a chastity that has left human relation behind. Parsipur places them beside each other. The parallel is not a contrast. Mahdokht leaves the human behind by leaving the body. Munis returns to it after the family has closed it to her. Both routes pass through injury.

Legitimacy has lost innocence, but not its pull. Fa’iza still wants Amir after chastity, marriage and reputation have shown their violence. The book does not treat that desire as stupidity. It treats it as injury folded into longing. She accepts a formal arrangement with him knowing what the institution has cost her, then refuses the house where she would live under the same roof as his wife.

Farrokhlaqa has money, a villa and social reach. She turns the garden into a managed public life: reception, patronage, usefulness. Her departure from marriage is real, but the new life still requires performance. Parsipur gives her latitude. Wealth has freed her from nothing.

In the brothel, Zarrinkolah's customers appear without face, speech or presence. Sex is body, payment and use. The morning glory child comes from a different order. Fertility does not arrive as comfort. It appears as something strange, severed from explanation, closer to wound than blessing.

Every exit has its shape. Seed, schoolroom, marriage, salon, ascent. The reprises move quickly, almost brutally. Mahdokht enters dispersal and long return. Zarrinkolah rises with the gardener and the morning glory beyond ordinary social repair. Munis passes through darkness and returns as a schoolteacher. Fa'iza marries Amir. Farrokhlaqa marries Merrikhi and moves into public usefulness. The speed is part of the discomfort. Parsipur sends each woman into continuation, then leaves the cost visible.

Women Without Men risks fable's compression over real damage. At times the final movements are too swift for the injuries they contain. Yet that haste belongs to the book's design. Parsipur builds no single model of freedom. She gives each woman a route away from the life assigned to her: tree, schoolroom, marriage, salon, ascent. Every route carries residue. The garden opens a breach in the social order, then shows how much of that order follows the women inside.

Advanced reader copy provided by NetGalley and Penguin Press UK – Allen Lane, Particular, Pelican, Penguin Classics