There are moments in a reader’s life when a thriller stops being just a game and becomes a mirror, and David McCloskey’s The Persian is exactly that kind of book. Published by W.W. Norton & Co./Jonathan Ball Publishers, it poses a question that feels painfully current: what happens when a spy is forced to reckon with the consequences of his deception? If that idea appeals, then this geopolitical thriller could almost have been lifted from a 2026 news headline. The novel explores the shadow war between Israel’s Mossad and Iran’s Qods Force, but it does not linger on boardroom briefings or satellite feeds. Instead, it burrows into the messy, intimate lives of people who never set out to become soldiers. The story unfolds across two timelines and multiple locations, opening with the remote assassination of an Iranian scientist developing technology to make drones invisible. His widow, Roya Shabani, witnesses his murder in all its sudden, terrifying clarity, and that single moment reshapes her entire existence. She becomes determined to avenge his death, but vengeance in a world of intelligence agencies is rarely straightforward. Deceived into helping Mossad in an attempt to protect herself, she gradually becomes an espionage asset while also becoming involved with a Qods operative. Already, the lines between right and wrong blur, and we feel the weight of her loneliness, the impossible burden of grieving in public while lying to everyone she meets. This is not a story about heroes and villains; it is a story about ordinary people forced to become something they never imagined, and McCloskey makes sure we feel every step of that transformation.
Then there is Kamran Esfahani, a Swedish-Persian Jewish dentist whose family left Iran after the fall of the Shah. His life is a portrait of quiet failure: a dental practice that is failing, a nagging sense of displacement, and a desperate dream of escaping to California. Kam is not a hardened operative or a patriotic warrior. He is a man who wants a second chance, a better life, a way out of a dead-end existence. When Mossad approaches him, the offer appears almost too convenient. He agrees to spy for them, not out of ideology, but because he needs money to finance his new life. What begins as a financial transaction, though, becomes increasingly personal as he is drawn deeper into the conflict. He meets people who remind him of where he came from, and he starts to feel attachments he never anticipated. The Iranian capital becomes more than a backdrop; it is a character in its own right, with its mountains and desert, its suffocating traffic and oppressive smog. McCloskey’s own experience with the CIA lends authenticity to every scene, from surveillance and assassinations to recruiting agents and organising covert operations. But the real genius of the novel is how it insists that spying is not a series of clever chess moves. Spying is messy. Spying is sitting in a cramped room with a stranger who might betray you at any moment. Spying is watching someone trust you while you slowly poison their life. Kamran’s story is full of these intimate betrayals, and McCloskey never lets us forget the human cost. The reader begins to understand that a “tradecraft” is just a polite word for manipulation, and that every successful operation leaves behind a trail of broken hearts and shattered identities.
Eventually, Kamran is captured by Qods after an attempt to kidnap an Iranian colonel. He is imprisoned and tortured, and he is repeatedly forced to write and rewrite his confession. This is where the novel’s tension becomes almost unbearable. His story provides much of the book’s narrative spine, and the reader gradually pieces together what really happened through his fractured memories and shifting accounts. It is not an easy reading experience. I struggled to follow the shifting timelines, viewpoints and allegiances, which made it difficult to keep track of who was working for whom and who belonged to which side. At one point I resorted to making my own list of characters and loyalties, scribbled in the margins of the book, just to stay afloat. The pace, too, is initially painfully slow; it took around 150 pages before the story began to resonate with me. And yet, in retrospect, I think that slowness is deliberate. McCloskey is not interested in easy chases or cheap twists. He wants us to feel the way espionage actually corrodes the soul. The confusion I experienced as a reader mirrored Kamran’s own disorientation, his inability to remember his own lies, his terror when he cannot tell which memory is real. Torture is not just physical in this novel; it is the slow unraveling of a man’s identity, and the rewriting of his confession becomes a kind of self-invention. Every draft is a different version of Kamran. Every version is a little more broken. It is harrowing, but it is also deeply human, because it asks an uncomfortable question: if you are forced to tell the same story over and over, at what point do you stop knowing who you are?
My perseverance paid off, and I want to be honest about that, because this is not a book that rewards impatient readers. Having travelled to Iran, I particularly enjoyed McCloskey’s atmospheric descriptions of Tehran. He captures the city’s strange beauty and its exhausting contradictions: the silent presence of the mountains, the harsh openness of the desert, the suffocating traffic that makes every journey feel like a small war, the oppressive smog that hangs over the streets like a judgment. I have experienced Iran’s Law Enforcement Command, the Faraja, and I can tell you that his insights into the country’s dress code are spot on. The way a woman adjusts her scarf, the way a man avoids eye contact with a patrol car, the careful negotiation of public and private behavior—these details are not just set dressing. They are the texture of daily life under a watchful state, and McCloskey renders them with tenderness and precision. His time with the CIA shows clearly. He knows how a surveillance operation feels from the inside, how a handler builds rapport, how an asset is recruited and turned, how a targeted killing is planned and executed. But he also knows that intelligence work is rarely clean. It is full of moral compromises and unintended consequences. The Tehran he describes is not a caricature; it is a living, breathing city full of ordinary people who are trying to live their lives under extraordinary pressure. For me, those passages were the most moving in the entire novel, because they reminded me that geopolitics is not an abstract chessboard. It is mothers and fathers and children, shopkeepers and students and surgeons, all of them caught in a storm they did not create.
Beneath the surface, The Persian is a meditation on the shadow war that has shaped the Middle East for decades. Written before the 2025 Israel-Iran war, the novel looks beneath the headlines at the darker, deeply personal conflict being fought in the shadows. It is a thoughtful exploration of what it means to deceive someone for a cause, and what it means to be deceived by your own side. Roya’s journey is particularly powerful, because she starts as a victim of violence and becomes an agent of it, all while believing she is protecting herself. Her relationship with a Qods operative complicates everything, because love and loyalty become tangled in ways that cannot be easily untangled. Kamran, meanwhile, is haunted by his own choices. He wanted a new life, but the life he ends up living is one of constant fear and moral compromise. The novel asks us to sit with these contradictions rather than resolve them. It is a demanding read, but ultimately a thought-provoking one. McCloskey does not offer easy answers or comforting morals. He simply shows us the consequences of a world where secrets are weapons and people are collateral damage. And because he is such a skilled writer, those consequences feel intimate. We see the small gestures of love, the panic in a dark room, the moment when a character realizes they have become the very thing they feared. It is unsettling, but it is also deeply honest, and in a genre that often romanticizes espionage, that honesty is a kind of bravery.
In the end, The Persian is a book that rewards patience, attention, and empathy. It is not the kind of thriller you can skim while commuting; it demands that you sit with it, wrestle with it, and let it unsettle you. The slow build in the first 150 pages is not a flaw but a foundation. McCloskey is building a world, and he knows that world cannot be rushed. By the time the story reaches its climax, every character carries the weight of everything that has come before, and the reader feels that weight too. I closed the book exhausted but grateful. It reminded me that espionage is not a glamorous game of cat and mouse. It is a human tragedy that unfolds in quiet rooms and dark streets, in the corners of cities that rarely make the news. Roya and Kamran are not symbols; they are people. Their stories are not just about politics; they are about grief, desire, hope, and the desperate need to survive. If you are looking for a thriller that entertains you with explosions and chase scenes, this may not be the book for you. But if you want to understand what happens when ordinary people are caught in a shadow war, when their loyalties are tested and their identities are twisted, The Persian will stay with you long after the final page. It is a demanding read, yes, but it is also a deeply human one, and in a world of easy answers and loud headlines, that humanity is the rarest kind of intelligence.