An Enduring Love: My Life with the Shah

Farah Pahlavi has lived a life of extremes: a loving marriage to the Shah that ended with his death in 1980; a period of luxury in the court followed by years of exile and loss. Her story has been covered in the press and in countless books, but here she speaks out for the rst time, and tells her own remarkable story.

The only child of an Iranian army ofcer, Farah Diba was an architecture student in Paris when she became engaged and married the Shah. Pitched from her ordinary existence into a maelstrom of paparazzi and international attention, she quickly became an icon for her age-a beautiful, serene young woman, romantically married to one of the most powerful men in the world. She writes about her early years and about Iran itself and her profound love for it, of encounters with world leaders, of family life in the palaces of Tehran.

She describes the divisions of Iranian society and the gradual shift of public opinion, fuelled by the rise in religious fundamentalism, which led to the sudden overthrow of the Shah in 1979. An Enduring Love includes a moving account of the year the Shah and his Queen spent wandering the globe, rejected from the United States and shuttling between Egypt, Morocco, the Bahamas, Panama, and Mexico. Farah Pahlavi details the years of exile after the Shah's death, as she rebuilt a life for herself and for her children in the United States. Written with an affecting simplicity and directness, this is both a powerful human document and a fascinating perspective on an especially turbulent period in Middle Eastern history.