TEHRAN – “Elsewhere” by Gabrielle Zevin, an internationally bestselling American author whose books have sold millions of copies and have been translated into over thirty languages, has recently been published in Persian in Tehran.

Khazeh is the publisher of the book translated by Mehrnaz Shirazi. The book was originally published by Farrar Straus Giroux in 2005.

“Elsewhere” is where fifteen-year-old Liz Hall ends up, after she has died. It is a place so much like the Earth, yet completely different. Here Liz will age backward from the day of her death until she becomes a baby again and returns to the Earth. But Liz wants to turn sixteen, not fourteen again. She wants to get her driver’s license. She wants to graduate from high school and go to college. And now that she’s dead, Liz is being forced to live a life she doesn’t want with a grandmother she has only just met. And it is not going well. How can Liz let go of the only life she has ever known and embraced a new one? Is it possible that a life lived in reverse is no different from a life lived forward?

This moving, often funny book about grief, death and loss will stay with the reader long after the last page is turned.

“Elsewhere” is Zevin’s best known young adult novel, which is an American Library Association Notable Children’s Book. Of “Elsewhere”, the New York Times Book Review wrote, “Every so often a book comes along with a premise so fresh and arresting it seems to exist in a category all its own… ‘Elsewhere’, by Gabrielle Zevin, is such a book.”

She is a graduate of Harvard University and lives in Los Angeles.

Her eighth novel, “The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry” (2014), spent months on the New York Times Bestseller List, reached #1 on the National Indie Best Seller List, and has been a bestseller all around the world. The Toronto Globe and Mail called the book “a powerful novel about the power of novels.” 

Her debut, “Margarettown”, was a selection of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program. “The Hole We’re In” was a New York Times Editor’s Choice title.

She is the screenwriter of “Conversations with Other Women”, for which she received an Independent Spirit Award Nomination for Best First Screenplay.

In 2009, she and director Hans Canosa adapted her novel “Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac” into the Japanese film, “Dareka ga Watashi ni Kiss wo Shita”. She has occasionally written criticism for the New York Times Book Review and NPR’s All Things Considered.

Photo: Front cover of the Persian translation of American writer Gabrielle Zevin’s novel “Elsewhere”.  

MMS/YAW