Published by Picador / Macmillan, 2000, 336 pages.

This book is a mosaic of Iran, made up through portraits of its people. It is perceptive, funny and thoroughly enjoyable. By providing a glimpse into everyday lives, it breaks the stereotypes about the country.

During this trip—a honeymoon for the Canadian couple, Alison Wearing and Ian—Alison often went out by herself, sometimes completely forgetting about her companion. Strange behaviour, you might think, for a honeymooning couple.

Except that, as she reveals a third of the way through the book, they’re not married, not even a couple. She wanted to visit Iran and since she couldn’t do it as a woman alone, she persuaded her gay roommate and close friend to go with her.

The book was published in 2000, so the trip probably took place in the late 1990s. The war between Iran and Iraq had ended less than a decade ago, and although president Hashemi Rafsanjani was the country more towards business, the hardliners were very much in charge. Alison complied with the strict rules about how women ought to dress and got herself a hejab (scarf to cover her hair), a manteau (a long, shapeless coat) and a chador (the cloth to drape over the hejab and manteau). While she was clearly foreign, her effort to blend in made her more approachable.

Ian and Alison stayed with friends of friends or in cheap hotels (and even once with a mullah!) and what emerges is a pattern of unfailing hospitality. In Shiraz, a man offers them a lift to the poet Hafez’s tomb but must pick up his mother first. The mother decides they should all go to her home for lunch instead. Hafez, after all, had been dead for 600 years and could wait; she was 74 and couldn’t. When Alison complains about the heat to a couple in a post office, they whisk her off to a mountain oasis hours away, leaving Ian a note, “Mr. Canada, We take your wife. We make her cold”. Even the police, who arrested Ian when he photographed a procession, plies them with endless cups of tea and buys them a film to replace the one they had to destroy.

Alison and Ian met people on both sides of the political divide: a young man who regretted not becoming a martyr in the recent war, people who had been imprisoned and tortured by the government, and those like Tip, a young man raised in the US and making money selling opium so he could eventually return. Alison also spent time with foreign women who were happily married to Iranian men and had chosen to stay in the country.

And that is the strength of Honeymoon in Purdah, in which portraits of a cross-section of the Iranian population bring the country to life. Iran is opening up to the world but the book’s portrayal of its resourceful, curious and hospitable people still holds true.

This review first appeared on Women on the Road.