Persia 2026: Azadi
What if the revolution happening right now in Iran became a thriller?
What if it already did?
Tehran. January 29, 2026. 10:12 PM.
Sara Shirazi posts a photo on her rooftop. Hair blowing in the wind. No veil. One word as a caption:
آزادی
Azadi (Freedom)
Three hours later, three knocks at the door.
Five days later, her husband Amir receives an official death certificate.
Cause of death: cardiac arrest. Collective burial. Case closed.
He believes the paper.
His six-year-old daughter doesn't.
"She's not dead, Papa."
What happens next will keep you up at night.
Amir Shirazi is not a soldier. Not a spy. Not a hero.
He's a freelance software engineer who pays his rent in crypto and climbs the stairs in a flickering hallway every night.
But he knows how to code. He knows how to think. And he knows that somewhere in Tehran, a machine is running - not a government, not a religion, but a violent criminal organization that uses God as a pretext and fear as its only real language.
So he takes apart a military drone on his kitchen table.
He cracks its firmware in three weeks.
And then a message arrives on Telegram - bouncing between Cyprus and Tel Aviv - from someone who calls himself Shlomo.
"We've been watching your tests. You know how to hack. You know how to fly. We can help you go further."
This is not your average thriller.
PERSIA 2026: AZADI reads like a collaboration between John le Carr and a Die Hard screenwriter - with the soul of a human story at its center.
It has the pace of a great action film. The moral complexity of the best political thrillers. And the emotional depth of a novel about love, family, resistance and hope.
But what makes it truly unique is this:
The cast of characters reads like a great ensemble film.Amir - the engineer who becomes something else entirely, one drone flight at a time.
Sara - the woman who refused to be afraid of her own face, and paid the price for it.
Leyla - six years old, who never believed the death certificate, and was right all along.
Shlomo - the Israeli contact you will never see. Only a voice in an earpiece. Dry, precise, occasionally almost funny. "The drone is worth more than you are. For now."
Ali and Hossein - two brothers in uniform who pretend to follow orders while choosing, slowly and painfully, which side of history they want to be on.
Mina - nineteen years old. She wanted to be an architect. She drew portraits in the margins of her notebooks. What they did to her in detention is never described directly. The whole novel carries it.
Kaveh - the man at the top. Villa in North Tehran. Red Porsche. Cocaine on the coffee table. The face of a regime that is not a theocracy. It is a mafia.
This novel does not take political sides, but it is against a machine that uses religion as a pretext, poverty as a recruiting tool, and violence as its only real language.
It gives you the inside view - how the IRGC really works, why a Basij militiaman finally drops his baton, why a regular army soldier hesitates before choosing, what Nowruz and Chaharshanbe Suri really mean to a people that refuses to disappear.
And it shares with you the hopes, the joys, the fears and the grief of that people.
Hoping for the best for them.
PERSIA 2026: AZADI - Book 1
The dates are real. The facts are real. The characters are fiction.
The line between them belongs to the reader.
David Jacob Chemla Author of Hidden Gospel - The Ebionite scriptures, the Hidden Gospel Saga and The Testaments of the twelve Patriarchs.
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