 It’s hard enough to generate one’s own ideas without having someone else’s superimposed over them, but the fictional Mandanipour tries … He writes a love story that is convincingly, achingly impossible in a place where men and women cannot even look at each other in public.The effect (as every good Victorian understood) is deliriously sensual prose.”

In 1994, Mandanipour was named Best Film Critique at the Press Festival in Tehran.In 1998, he received the Golden Tablet Award for best fiction of the past 20 years in Iran.