The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji review – highly entertaining matrilineal saga

The Persians features characters who have been living in the US since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images

In the opening chapter of Sanam Mahloudji’s dynamic first novel, marital strife, intoxication and an arrest for solicitation are merely the prelude to a scene in which $30,000-worth of jewels and watches are flung from a sparkling Aspen ski slope.

The woman responsible for most of that is Shirin, a Houston-based events organiser holidaying with her extended family. Consistently provocative and self-dramatising, Shirin makes a kind of performance art out of her snowballing midlife crisis, but hers is just one of five contrasting perspectives from which this matrilineal saga is told.