Clarisse Ayvazian is the model 1960s wife and mother. She leads an unremarkable life with her well-respected engineer husband and three children, tucked away in a wealthy, middle-class neighbourhood of Abadan.

But her tranquillity ends forever with the arrival of an enigmatic Armenian family across the street. The debonair widower, his beguiling tween daughter, and his mother, a domineering aristocrat with an exotic past, steal their way into Clarisse's home. Suddenly, passions, politics, and a plague of locusts whip up emotions she never knew she had. Struggling to understand her new found discontent, Clarisse must face up to the life she never had - and whether she should take it now.

With subtlety and humour, Pirzad has crafted a deeply personal insight into the hopes and aspirations of Iranians in the period leading up to the Islamist Revolution.