FICTION

CRY OF THE PEACOCK by Gina Barkhorder Nahai (Crown Publishers: $20; 337 pp.). The story opens with a fortune teller whose golden-haired son is at the mercy of an alchemist, and it closes with an old woman named Peacock whose life ends in the violence of a revolution. Tracing the lives of generations of Jews in Persia over the course of two centuries, through to modern-day Iran and Khomeini’s overthrow of the Shah, Nahai weaves a rich narrative tapestry. She draws on the events of history in a culture that provides plenty of raw material--massacres, starvation, plague, religious fanaticism, oppression, lust for power. She connects Iran’s past and present so convincingly that Khomeini’s takeover seems inevitable. She writes that she went through “years of interviews and volumes of books” to create this novelized history of the Persian Jews. It rings with truth, but it is also a spellbinding story that’s hard to put down.