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.