MINA REMAINS: a novel of the papers we signed without reading

She signed the paper without reading it. It took seven years to find out what she had signed.Mina is eight when she learns that her eyes talk - that a girl can be told to keep them low. At eighteen a man comes to the house with his mother, and she says yes, because yes is what there is. Then a deed is put in front of her with her own name on it, and she signs.Mina Remains follows one woman from a village outside Tabriz to a frozen warehouse in west London. It is a novel about what a woman keeps: a tea tin, a blue notebook, four hundred and sixteen English words counted one by one. A university degree taken on Wednesdays, after a four o'clock start and a bus and a walk. A promise of three hundred Friday telephone calls.In London she works nights in a cold store at minus twenty-one degrees - twenty minutes in, ten minutes out. On Mondays she teaches English in a community centre to people who have less of it than she does. Her daughters grow up in a language she is still learning.Told entirely in Mina's own voice, across three languages that do not always agree, this is a novel about the papers we sign without reading - and about what is still standing when the signing is done.Mina Remains was written in Persian and translated into English by the author. The Azerbaijani Turkish in the book is left untranslated, as it was heard; a list at the back is there for readers who want it.