I found the book interesting and some of the stories were quite engaging. However, since each new chapter was a completely different person's story, with not connection, I sometimes found it jarring when I started a new chapter.

There were some hard to read stories. Overall, I'd recommend it.

3.5 stars rounded down. This is a collection of stories of Tehranis who are (mostly) on the margins of society - either due to privilege or oppression. Some other reviews critiqued this selection as being unrepresentative, but I actually think by circling around the edges, I got a clearer sense of "normal" life in Tehran. The stories are interesting, well written, and reach incredible depth ... which is the biggest problem this book has.

For this book to be a non-fiction, second-hand account there were clearly lots of liberties and flourishes added to achieve the level of detail. It took me out of the book every time I tried to reconcile parts of a story being factual and the author being able to have access to such emotion depth and nuance of the people described. I truly do believe the events occurred, but the story telling makes it read more like historical fiction at times. Non-fiction or historical fiction, however, it's a fascinating set of stories about a place many in the West know very little about.

This book was really frustrating. I went into thinking it was going to be journalistic portraits of several different Iranian people. But when it was all over and I read the afterward, I felt like this book was closer to fiction. Every story was so depressing and they mostly ended in the worst possible way. It was hard to get through it. But then I realized that each story was a composite of a bunch of different people that she had met and interviewed. She mashed all their lives together to create the most sensationally messed up life that she could. It just read as a really fatalistic, tabloid version of reality. She couldn't have just picked real people and told their real stories? Ugh, I'm mad at this book.

I’d probably only recommend this book to people who are interested in Iran, but for people who are it’s a unique read, if a bit sensationalized.

So many of the accounts of life in Iran that are popular in the west are centered around the lives of the privileged or the exiled. When I went to Iran, I realized that these accounts don’t come close to giving a full picture of what the country is like, and I am grateful to Navai for going to such lengths to showcase an impressively diverse sample of Tehranis.

Her true achievement however is not the diversity she shows, but rather the unity. I loved how all the characters, despite their ideological and socio-economic differences, were in some ways united: physically by a road and symbolically by their lies and their love of their city despite its many flaws.

Each chapter focuses on a different character and is a completely different story than all the others. The thing that ties them all together is a main thoroughfare in the center of Tehran. At some times the writing is beautiful, thoughtful, and even poetic. Other times, it is rushed and abrupt. The stories are billed as non-fiction, but read the notes in the back and the author explains that she pushes the boundaries of that label.Overall it is interesting, but sensationalized.

A series of profiles of people living and working in modern Tehran and how they navigate life under a theocratic regime. Ramita Navai writes with journalistic detachment, but this is more creative nonfiction than it is straight reportage.

In the "Sources" section at the end of the book, Navai reveals that not only have some details been changed to protect her subjects—understandable and indeed advisable in order to protect them from a repressive regime—but that some of these subjects are in fact composites based on second- or third-hand information. For me, this cast a bit of a retrospective pall on the book. Since there's no way of knowing what's fiction(alised) and what "really" happened, there's no way of knowing to what extent Navai invented elements specifically to grab the reader more. Some of the profiles are fairly pulpy, and that plus the sometimes too-neat endings make me suspicious as to what extent City of Lies was tailored to fit the preconceptions that Western armchair cultural tourists have of Iran.

Still worth the read, I think, but with that grain-of-salt caveat.