Stolen Revolution: Betrayal and Hope in Modern Iran

The moving, riveting and immersive story of six Iranians who, together, lived the entire arc of modern Iranian history: the promise of the 1979 revolution, its betrayal by the Islamic mafia state and a people’s undying spirit of resistance.

Fuelled by Iranians’ dreams of social justice and political freedom, the 1979 revolution swept aside the shah’s ailing, repressive monarchy. But in its place the revolution’s leader Ayatollah Khomeini and his acolytes built a system that served his narrow Islamic fundamentalist faction and worsened every failing and brutality that had existed under the shah. Award-winning journalists Bozorgmehr Sharafedin and Yeganeh Torbati tell the entwined stories of six Iranians, providing a powerful new lens on Iran’s recent history in all its bitter twists and stubborn hope:

• Mehdi Karroubi: a devotee of Khomeini, he rose to the heights of power on the wave of the revolution, before being cast out of its inner circle.

• Hila Sedighi: a young activist, who gave voice through her poetry to her peers’ hopes during the reform years and ultimately immortalised their shattered dreams.

• Amir Moghadam: an ambitious government bureaucrat, who witnessed corruption and graft on a scale that impelled him to take enormous risks to expose the truth.

• Said Rahmani: a successful global tech entrepreneur who returned to Iran to spark a start-up boom in his native country, and encountered a ruthless security state that wanted his company for itself.

• Rozhin Yousefzadeh and Kosar Eftekhari: both born in the 1990s, they escaped their gendered destinies by leaving their hometowns for Tehran, where they joined a mass movement that confronted a ferocious state apparatus: the Woman Life Freedom protests. Each paid an enormous price.

Through vivid and original reporting, Stolen Revolution offers a compulsively readable new story of Iran, centring ordinary Iranians’ lives, whilst providing a visceral understanding of how life is actually lived under a modern authoritarian state. This is a harrowing story of power, corruption and greed – and those brave individuals who fought back.

'Rare and riveting . . . Powerful personal stories are woven together to provide new insight and understanding' LYSE DOUCET

‘A must-read for anyone seeking an honest appraisal of revolutionary Iran and the bloody twists and turns of its theocratic regime . . . compulsively readable . . . unputdownable’ JON LEE ANDERSON

‘So timely, and so apposite . . . In the tradition of John Hersey’s classic Hiroshima, Sharafedin and Torbati tell the story of modern Iran in a compelling and accessible way. Essential reading' LINDSEY HILSUM, author of I BROUGHT THE WAR WITH ME

© Bozorgmehr Sharafedin and Yeganeh Torbati 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026