After the Fall of Heaven

Throughout life, you stand at many crossroads, where you have to make a choice-you have to go left or right. For the most part, one convinces oneself that the choices one makes and the decisions one makes are made on the basis of rational and sensible considerations, but often it is our emotions that ultimately make the difference. Other times, it is some external circumstances or coincidences that determine whether one is going to follow the path to the left or to the right.

For most people, it doesn't matter much which way they follow; most get where they want to go, perhaps with a few knubs, but rarely life-threatening.

In this book, we follow a little Iranian boy-Kioumars-from the age of four until he, as a middle-aged man, writes his memoirs as a Danish citizen in a suburb of Copenhagen. For him, conscious choices, coincidences, or external circumstances have several times meant life or death or vastly different life courses. The book takes us to a newly built neighborhood in Tehran, where we follow family life closely for better and worse, described with a lovely sense of humor. After the revolution, Kioumars flees, and the trip through the mountains to the Turkish border and the wait in Turkey is nerve-wracking. The final destination is Denmark, where he encounters a very different culture in a welfare society that surprises him and presents challenges.

In the book, Kioumars looks back on his life and on all the crossroads he has stood by. Several times, coincidences have saved his life; coincidences also led him to Denmark and not to the United States, which was originally his great wish; not wanting to participate in the Iraq War was a conscious choice and led to the escape, and later it was external circumstances that changed Kioumars's life radically as he did not flee but moved from Iran to Denmark.

The book is written humorously and unsentimentally but is still experienced as a heartbreaking tale of being a refugee and leaving his homeland and settling into a new culture.