For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Azar Nafisi hosted weekly gatherings of female former students whom she had taught at university. As they read and discussed forbidden works of Western literature—Pride and Prejudice, Washington Square, Daisy Miller, and Lolita—they saw how their own stories intertwined with those they were reading. Nafisi also relates her own story in this memoir, a 2004 Book Sense Book of the Year Finalist.