An Iranian Family Saga That Reads Like a Movie

Rabeah Ghaffari has had an exceptional career. She’s an actor, documentarian, and film editor who has worked with Shirin Neshat and Tony Kushner, and, most recently, written a screenplay for Sex and the City costumer Patricia Field. She’s told many stories in many forms — but when she began thinking about a retired judge and his wife in pre-Revolution Iran, holding their family together from the center of an ancient orchard, she knew this story was different. Ghaffari began writing a screenplay, which morphed into her debut novel, To Keep the Sun Alive.