review of the book for the Boston Globe said, “A spectacular debut memoir . . . Only a major writing talent like Hakakian can use the pointed words of the mature mind to give the perspective of the child. … She tackles ideologies of assimilation and oppression with poetic aplomb and precision. ... . Hakakian’s tale of passage into womanhood lacks nothing.” The Baltimore Sun said of the book, “Hakakian, irrepressible, brave, and strong-willed, watches in dismay as the country she loves disappears, to be replaced by one that views what Roya most values—an insatiable intellect—with profound contempt. Like Anne Frank, she is a perceptive, idealistic, terribly sympathetic chronicler of the gathering repression.” The great late literary scholar Harold Bloom hailed the book and called it, “An immensely moving, extraordinarily eloquent, and passionate memoir.” He prophesied that the author would have a major literary career ahead. Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran has been a Freshman Experience Book at several colleges throughout the US and has been translated into Dutch, Spanish, and German. It was selected by The Guardian as the top 10 books about Iran in 2020. Assassins of the Turquoise Palace In her second book Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (Grove/Atlantic), Hakakian departs from the personal narrative form to delve into a work of investigative journalism. She carefully pieces together, through eyewitness testimonies, police reports, archival documents, court evidence, and countless interviews, the story of the assassination of four Iranian and Kurdish leaders at a restaurant named Mykonos in Berlin, Germany in 1992. She begins the book from the moment of the crime and follows the events until the historic verdict that the court issued in April 1997. The work marks the first time that a highly political event in contemporary Iranian history has been told in a nonfictional narrative form for general readers. In a starred review, Kirkus Reviews called the book "a nonfiction political thriller of a very high order." Assassins of the Turquoise Palace was a New York Times Book Review Editor's Pick and a New York Times’ Notable Book of 2011. In a piece for Slate Magazine, the great late public intellectual Christopher Hitchens said of the book "Even as they continue to breach every known international law, all the while protesting at interventions in their 'internal affairs,' the theocrats in Tehran stand convicted of mounting murderous interventions