Taking her cue from a challenge thrown to her at a reading, the author energetically responds to those who say fiction has nothing to teach us today. She tells the story of a country where the villains are conformity, and orthodoxy and the only passport to entry is a free mind and a willingness to dream.

Every Thursday morning in a living room in Iran, over tea and pastries, the author and other women meet in secret to discuss forbidden works of Western literature. This book tells how they lose themselves in the worlds of Lolita, and share their own stories, dreams with each other, and, for a few hours, taste freedom.