Quantum Spy: A Book You Must Read Twice

Forget everything you knew about spy thrillers. In the duology of Isfahan and Shiraz, the real conspiracy lurks not in secret dossiers but in family living rooms, and the main enemy isn’t the CIA or Mossad, but a distorted reflection in the mirror.

Imagine: you’ve reached the last page of a tense, cold-as-steel thriller. The plotlines have converged into a deadlock, leaving you in a state of intellectual shock. You try to make sense of a finale that offers no answers, only multiplying the questions. And then the author says, “And now, please, read the prequel. Only now.” And you, complying, open the first chapter of the “backstory” and realize—you’ve been deceived. In the best possible sense of the word.

This is precisely the intricate experience offered by the duology consisting of the novellas Isfahan and Shiraz. These are not just two books, but a single novel designed like a Möbius strip—to understand it fully, you must travel the entire path, then return to the beginning only to see that it has become the end.

Isfahan greets us with the sterile atmosphere of an Iranian nuclear facility. The protagonist, Zahra Mousavi, is a brilliant physicist, a woman with a mathematical mind, forced to exist in a world where logic gives way to paranoia. After the mysterious disappearance of a colleague, you learn she is embroiled in a spy game where every glance, every word, every phone call could be either salvation or a death sentence. The author masterfully builds suspense not through shootouts, but through interrogation transcripts, awkward silences at the family dinner table, walks in the park, and the growing feeling that the walls (and her husband) have ears. The finale of Isfahan is a masterpiece of the genre: two “mirror-image” memos from two rival intelligence agencies that present entirely different, yet equally convincing, pictures of what happened. The reader is left in ruins, as if after an explosion, unable to tell who is the victim and who is the puppet master.

And this is where Shiraz enters the stage.

The prequel is a journey into Zahra’s past, to 1997, to the city of roses and poets, to her adolescence. The cold thriller gives way to a warm, nostalgic family drama. We see her parents: her mother, a doctor dreaming of a “spring of freedom,” and her father, a theologian who seeks not only faith in the Quran but also mathematical patterns. And alongside them is Uncle Javad, a counterintelligence officer whose progressive illness sharpens his paranoia to prophetic levels.

In debates on a dusty Shiraz carpet, while trying to comprehend the victory of the reformist Khatami, the father and uncle create a conspiracy theory of incredible depth and madness. They call it the “Dark Enlightenment”—a doctrine according to which the West is trying to destroy Islam not through liberalism, but through a simulacrum of tradition: by imposing ultra-conservative values from which God has been excised. They fear the West will offer them order without justice and strength without mercy.

For the reader already familiar with Isfahan, this journey into the past becomes a form of shock therapy. It becomes clear that the actions of the adult Zahra are not merely those of a mother trying to protect her children’s future. They are an echo of her own childhood trauma, her desperate attempt to finish the intellectual game her father and uncle started. Every step she takes in Isfahan acquires a poignant, tragic meaning.

And the final chord of Shiraz—a short postscript in the form of yet another memo—is utterly mind-blowing. It turns out that the “Dark Enlightenment” theory, created to protect Iran, was weaponized by Iran’s own intelligence services, reforged into an ideological weapon, and… successfully “exported” to the West, where it was enthusiastically adopted by niche American intellectuals. The warning became the manual. The worst nightmare of Zahra’s father and uncle became a reality, not for their country, but for their enemies. And it was orchestrated by their own colleagues.

The author has created more than just a novel. He has created an intellectual labyrinth where personal drama fuels global history, and family paranoia becomes an export commodity. The Isfahan and Shiraz duology is a rare example of literature that doesn’t just entertain but forces you to think, to compare, and to doubt. It’s a story of how good intentions pave the road to a hell built from one’s own blueprints. It is a book that proves the most complex conspiracy theory is the one we construct to deceive ourselves.

It is highly recommended to read them in the specified order: Isfahan first, then Shiraz. And be prepared, after the finale, to return to the first page and start all over again. Only then will the patterns on this Persian carpet assemble into a complete, frightening, and mesmerizing picture.