City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death, and the Search for Truth in Tehran Hardcover – September 2, 2014

“Taken together, the book's eight compulsively readable chapters, each focused on a different Iranian, paint a harrowing portrait of the city today… Readers are granted a panoramic view of Tehrani society: from the faux-Greek mansions that house the nouveau riche in the city's north, to a midtown bustling with students, merchants and young women with ‘enough make-up to make a drag queen recoil,’ to the shacks and poverty of south Tehran.” —Wall Street Journal

“City of Lies is an extraordinary insight into a country barely known—and often feared—by the West.” —Vogue

“[A] collection of beautifully written profiles.”—Publishers Weekly

“Navai, a British-Iranian journalist, takes readers on a journey of personal stories plucked from up and down the boulevard, from the grandeur of the northern points, with ornate houses from French colonial times and high-end shopping districts, to the crowded, working-class and poorer areas in the south.… Navai writes with punch, providing an immediacy that makes for compulsive page-turning.”—Booklist

“The stories are real. But they are written in a lively style that reads like a novel. Navai is impressive as a reporter, finding these characters and convincing them to share their stories. She also is an eloquent writer who uses her subjects to tell the larger tale of the degradation of the Iranian culture.”—Bookpage

“A daring exposé of what really goes on under the noses of the morality police in this God-fearing city of 12 million…. British-Iranian journalist Navai protects the real identities of her subjects, who are as engaging as characters of fiction and reveal, frankly, the charade that living under Sharia law has become since Iran’s Islamic Revolution….Navai offers sharply rendered portraits.”—Kirkus

“[Navai’s] beautifully written book captures the pace, pulse and passions of day-to-day existence.”—Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“It’s a well-paced, entertaining read. But its fascinating mix of characters and its refusal to be distracted by Iran’s many external problems are what make City of Lies truly valuable."—The National Interest

“It is here, amid the tyre shops and garages, the "decaying houses shedding brick and dust into gaping holes and alleys that spread out like rivulets, some barely wider than two shoulders, where dirt-encrusted children with matted hair played in the streets next to smacked-out prostitutes slumped on the cracked asphalt" that Navai finds her best effects.”—The Guardian

“An intriguing collection of cameo portraits to illustrate the difficulties and challenges Tehranis face in their everyday lives… Navai provides a fascinating insight into the routine hypocrisy and dishonesty that have become the survival mechanism for millions of ordinary city-dwellers.”—Mail on Sunday(UK)

"An intriguing book based on the premise that, to survive in a repressive regime where the government believes it has the right to interfere in even your most intimate matters, you have to lie... A talented writer... Navai has a reporter's eye for the telling detail... this is a timely and beautifully written insight into the lives of Tehranis—"masters at manipulating the truth", Navai says—just as their country seems to be opening up." —Christina Lamb, THE SUNDAY TIMES (UK)

"Welcome to life in the Islamic Republic of Iran - or, more specifically, in its teeming, ugly, catastrophically polluted capital city. Ramita Navai is an award-winning British-Iranian journalist and broadcaster who has lived in Tehran and London, and feels allegiance to both countries. It was while working as a newspaper correspondent in Tehran that she began interviewing a wide range of ordinary people about their lives, collecting stories which are (unsurprisingly) extraordinary. This gripping book is a mosaic of such glimpses into a very different world... the chapters read like utterly compelling short tales, catapulting us imaginatively into the hearts and minds of people we feel we know, even though their lives are so very 'other'... It is the author's considerable achievement to make you feel deeply moved by these lives - even as you send up a fervent prayer of gratitude that we were lucky enough to be born here."—Bel Mooney, DAILY MAIL (UK)

"City of Lies explores the double lives led by Tehranis as they evade the watchful eye of the regime... a rich portrait of this vibrant, opaque and paranoid city... at the heart of City of Lies is some brilliant reporting. Persuading subjects to talk, even anonymously, is an achievement where betrayal is commonplace and there is always someone watching. Black humour runs through the book."—Hugh Tomlinson, THE TIMES

‘Navai's Tehran teems with crystal meth pushers, gun runners, prostitutes and transexuals... what makes City of Lies engaging is that it is rooted in real-life stories... It is, in many ways, the written version of a television docudrama, with parallel stories that never intersect."—Farah Nayeri, THE INDEPENDENT

“[Navai’s] Iranians share stories intimate and unforgettable enough to establish City of Lies as a remarkable and highly readable map of its human geography.…The stories are almost unbelievable. They reveal a Tehran so riddled with social, political, sexual and religious contradictions that it’s difficult to imagine how someone could navigate the fraught maze of daily life. Navai stunned this reader with her attention to detail… Navai’s prose is startling.”—Eliza Griswold, THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH (UK)

"Telling the story of Tehran through a cast of characters...Navai illustrates how Iranians are far more bound by what they have in common: a strong awareness of class, an irrepressible drive for upward mobility, daily clashes with the forces of modernity and tradition, and a profound disillusionment with the opportunities society has on offer. Fast-paced and saturated with detail each chapter describes a Tehrani whose life the treacherous, glittering city has disfigured in some way... what [Navai] has done is extraordinary. Despite the bleakness of life in their "city of lies", her Iranians continue to soldier on, hoping the future holds something better.”—Azadeh Moaveni, FINANCIAL TIMES (UK)

"City of Lies is thoroughly researched and deeply evocative of place. Navai has a formidable talent as a storyteller. Her stories are by turns comical, intriguing and heart-wrenching. And although there's a great deal of sadness in the stories she tells, she writes with obvious love for the wondrous variety of life in Tehran."—GEOGRAPHICAL

"City of Lies is a fascinating account of ordinary life in a major city where religious fanaticism has been allowed to run riot. It's hard to close the book without valuing the freedom secularisation brings, and the relative absence of hypocrisy that arrives through not having to repress human nature." —ENTERTAINMENT FOCUS

“A masterpiece of true tales turned into rich, gripping, vivid narrative… The amazing aspect of the book is that Navai manages to transform every tale into exquisitely detailed, terrible — but somehow wonderful — novellas. …There’s something cinematic in Navai’s style. Any one of these stories could be adapted for the big screen as a feature film…. This book is a caution, a tragedy, a seduction.”—Liz Smith

Ramita Navai is a British-Iranian foreign affairs journalist who has reported from over thirty countries including South Sudan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Nigeria, El Salvador, and Zimbabwe. She has made twenty documentaries for Channel 4’s series, “Unreported World,” and she was awarded an EMMY for her undercover report from Syria for PBS “Frontline.” She has also worked as a journalist for the United Nations in Pakistan, Iraqi Kurdistan, and Iran, and was the Tehran correspondent for The Times from 2003 to 2006.