Sarah Crossan’s “Toffee” at Iranian bookstores

TEHRAN –(Iranart)- Irish writer Sarah Crossan’s novel “Toffee” has recently been published in Persian.

Ofoq is the publisher of the book translated into Persian by Keyvan Abidi Ashtiani.

“I am not who I say I am. Marla isn’t who she thinks she is. I am a girl trying to forget. Marla is a woman trying to remember,” reads the synopsis of the book.

Allison has run away from home and with nowhere to live finds herself hiding out in the shed of what she thinks is an abandoned house. But the house isn’t empty. An elderly woman named Marla, with dementia, lives there, and she mistakes Allison for an old friend from her past called Toffee.

Allison is used to hiding who she really is, and trying to be what other people want her to be. And so, Toffee is who she becomes. After all, it means she has a place to stay. There are worse places she could be. But as their bond grows, and Allison discovers how much Marla needs a real friend, she begins to ask herself - where is home? What is a family? And most importantly, who am I, really?

Toffee is divided into short pieces, a page or two in length; each of these is as satisfying as a smoothed piece of seaglass, strung together to create a spectrum of pain and consolation. The sparse words reveal the artistry in every phrase. The book is saturated by the sense of secrecy. 

Though “Toffee” is a pain-filled story, it is also hopeful and profoundly moving, laced with old hurts and small kindnesses; it’s a book that changes its reader for the better.

Crossan graduated with a degree in philosophy and literature before training as an English and drama teacher at Cambridge University, and worked to promote creative writing in schools before leaving teaching to write full time.

She completed her masters in creative writing at the University of Warwick in 2003 and in 2010 received an Edward Albee Fellowship for writing.

“The Weight of Water” published by Bloomsbury in January 2012, is her first novel.

source: Tehran Times