When a teenage girl is arrested by Iranian authorities, it's more like an accidental abduction. Her brother dabbles in politics forbidden by the fundamentalist ruling regime, but the girl is innocent.

Only there is no innocence in The Bathhouse. If you have been apprehended, you must have committed a crime. If you have committed a crime, you must be punished. The girl finds herself in a living hell, where torture is an art form. She - and all those around her - suffers in an accelerating cycle of pain and humiliation limited only by the imagination of her captors. And yet the girl finds, and creates, sparks of humanity in this most ihhuman setting.

The Bathhouse might be an attempt to measure the depths of institutionalized evil. In spite of being forced to contemplate so much unrestrained cruelty and violence, I could not make myself look away. And I could not put this book down until I finished it.

Powerful, disturbing and brilliant, the Bathhouse is a harrowing account of an innocent 17-year-old girl thrown into an Iranian prison. Told in first person, the story brings you inside the cell walls and never flinches from the mental and physical torture that happens there. What makes this novel not only bearable but beautiful are the familial relationships the girl develops among the other women prisoners, including a doctor, a professor and her mother, a school girl and a madwoman. Farnoosh Moshiri is a master storyteller, and as a survivor of a holocaust in her homeland, she has so much to tell us, not only about the horror of a religious dictatorship but ultimately, about the triumph of the human soul.

Once you begin reading this fictional account of a young woman's ordeals under a fundamentalist regime, you, like I, will not be able to lay the book down until you finish it. It took me about four hours to read this lyrically gripping story. Moshiri takes you inside the thoughts and feelings of a young woman just blossoming into adult life, yet subject to the most abject debasement, inflicted in the name of a divinity too terrible for the real world---or is it?
The fundamentalist jailers and their victims, all women, are fictional, but the ordeals described are experiences of Iranian women in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Approaching the barbarity of the Taliban, the womens' prison, a converted bathhouse, leaves an indelible mark on those who survive it.
The arbitrariness of fundamentalist regimes is accentuated by the situation of the 17 year-old protagonist, a young woman arrested by mistake but treated like a political prisoner nonetheless.
Moshiri's writing is direct, realistic and gripping in this novel, yet an aura develops that is hauntingly lyrical, as is the author's artwork, reproduced on the dust jacket of the novel.
Read this novel for its craft of writing, read it for its immediate relevancy to current events in the mideast, read it for its exploration of a woman's initiation into adulthood, but read it now!!!!

How many people read "serious literature?" How manay people read "big serious novels?" Not many. How many people have access to serious literature published by smaller publishers? The number is even less. I found "At the Wall of the Almighty" in a discount bookstore and since the Middle Eastern affairs are hot, I picked it up. The more I read the more I found myself in a world that Kafka, Conrad, Joyce, Beckett, and other great similar writers have created. The freshness of narrative, the imagery, the many stories within stories, magical realism, surrealism, pure realism, drama within fiction, dream and illusion ... all and all are masterly crafted to tell the story of a prisoner who has forgotten his name as the result of the tortures of Islamic Fundamentalist jailors. Read this book and after finding your way out of the labyrinths of Moshiri's novel (if you ever find your way out!) you will realize that you have changed. This is what great art does and I regret that a major publisher is not paying attention to this contemporary masterpiece. The time is now ripe to introduce Moshiri's book to the world.

At first, the book is almost difficult to read because the tale of "the unbreakable one" being in prison is so bleak and depressing but as he descends further into this physical hell the author also takes us into the mind of this nameless character who descends into his own world of memories in order to survive. It's this dichotomy of the horror of prison and the beauty that still survives in his mind that captivates the reader and draws us into the story. It's a wonderful tribute to the power of imagination and to the strength of independent thought in the face of fanacticism. The last few chapters are especially moving and rewarding. After I closed the book I found myself sitting silently for a while in quiet awe of the author's masterful ability to take me on such a satisfying journey.

At the Wall of the Almighty shows what it would feel like to be cast into the worst level of hell. The nameless narrator is pulled through the labyrinth of a fanatical prison with his imagination as his only salvation. With his longing for home and his lost twin, he is a loveable hero, and we long for his escape. What makes the book bearable is his dignity and innocence in the face of such raw brutality. His spirit never breaks.