Omid's Shadow

Two women are caught up in revolutions thirty years apart. A third woman—the woman who connects them—carries the scars of loss that time has not healed. Weaving together the past and the present, two storylines tell the life of Omid, the daughter of one revolutionary and the mother of another… Omid's Shadow traces the journey of mothers and daughters caught in the currents of political upheaval and personal reinvention. In 1978, seventeen-year-old Omid flees Iran on the eve of the Islamic Revolution, leaving behind a mother whose anti-regime activism has made her a political pariah. Arriving in America, Omid is isolated, determined her stay will be temporary. But her world is upended when her mother becomes a fugitive, targeted by the Revolutionary Guard, and Omid's connection to Iran becomes a lifetime of unresolved pain and separation. Thirty years later, Omid lives in Connecticut with her two daughters. When her older daughter, Sayeh, is arrested in Iran on false charges, Omid's buried trauma resurfaces. As Sayeh escapes and joins the ranks of young revolutionaries in Tehran, Omid is torn between fear for her daughter's safety and a stirring recognition of the revolutionary fervor she, too, once felt. The echoes of her own youthful rebellion come crashing back, forcing Omid to confront the woman she once was and the mother she's become. A stirring meditation on identity, activism, and the legacies of political strife, Omid's Shadow explores how the past shapes the present, and how the bonds of family endure even across the most turbulent of times.