Everyone knows how these stories end.
Almost nobody has heard them from inside.

Open any volume in this series and you land somewhere unexpected: not on the battlefield, but in the head of someone standing at the edge of it. A prisoner working out whether to lie. A girl in armour who has already calculated how long the disguise will hold. A horse who has carried a nation’s hopes for so long he has opinions about it. The fighting happens; you simply hear it from where these people are standing.

Which means the reader always knows more than the characters do — and can see the disaster coming while everyone in the story is still busy being proud, or frightened, or too careful to ask a question. Nothing is softened and no ending is rewritten. But the endings hurt differently when you have spent sixty pages inside both sides of a silence, and you close the book thinking why didn’t he just say it rather than what a hero.

Atoosa Salehi set out to take a work of overwhelming grandeur and rebuild it from within each story, following the paths through the Shahnameh that are least travelled. Widely praised by critics and readers since it first appeared, the series has won a long list of awards and is now the subject of several university dissertations, particularly for its treatment of the epic’s women.

Niloofar Mirmohammadi illustrated all twelve volumes. Her figures are drawn in dense pen-line and set against fields of Persian script, with Ferdowsi’s original couplets running alongside the prose, so poem and retelling stay visible to each other on every page. Each volume opens with an illustrated family tree.