A LUCKY few among a generation of Iranian writers and activists . . .such as the playwright Kazem Sharahiyi who found asylum in Paris . . . today live lives of exile in European cities. They are ?lucky" only in the sense that many of counterparts never made it alive from the torture chambers and prisons operated by the shah of Iran. And even more who agitated at huge personal risk against that American puppet's dictatorial regime quickly discovered that . . . having fought so hard to remove him . . . they were now back in those same prisons being operated with increased brutality by Khomeini.

'Kader Abdolah' was among the lucky" ones. He found asylum in Holland, although this is not his real name, but a pen name invented in memory of friends who died under the present regime in Iran. In real life Adbolah fought against both dictatorships but, as Ishmeal, the occasional narrator of this superb novel, explains: ?During the shah's regime you could count on the support of the people. . . [he] governed in his own name, but the mullahs governed in the name of God. . . suddenly your country was no longer your own.

You didn't dare take a step. You had the feeling that people were watching you from behind their curtains."

My Father's Notebook brilliantly gives us a Persian history of the 20th century, but this is no mere political tract by a leftist fighter who fought to create freedom for his people sandwiched between these two tyrannies. Like the author himself, Ishmael does get involved in an underground resistance movement with devastating consequences, yet My Father's Notebook is the work of a truly imaginative novelist brilliantly in control of his material and weaving together an extraordinary tapestry of different worlds.

There is Ishmael's current world as a refugee in Holland trying to write his life story and decipher the extraordinary notebooks left by his father. There is his early life in Iran as he is drawn deeper into revolutionary politics. Then there is the even more extraordinary world of his father . . . Aga Akbar, the illegitimate deaf mute son of a nobleman who is raised by his uncle, and who adopts ancient cuneiform as his private written language.

Akbar is an extraordinary character, both a dreamer and a hardworker, able to communicate only with sign language. From the time Ishmael is born he becomes the mouth and ears of his father. Even as Ishmael's own journey through the radical books he reads takes him away from his father's simple religion, the link between father and son is never broken.

In using Akbar's life as a deaf mute carpet weaver who leaves the respect of his relatively medieval village to bring his family to the city of Tehran so that his children might be educated, Abdolah creates a wondrous tale of a country's difficult journey towards modernity . . . driven by the shah's father, a vicious and passionate moderniser whose police tore veils off women and insisted on French style hats. The power of the mullahs is suppressed but never goes away until they rise to drag the country back into the past.

But beyond the politics and history, this is a novel about an unbreakable link between father and son.

Published originally in Dutch by the small radical publisher de Geus, it is appropriately published in this translation (by Susan Massotty) by the Edinburgh-based Canongate.

This is a deeply engaging novel that I could not recommend highly enough.