Blind Owl cover art

Blind Owl

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Blind Owl

By: Sadeq Hedayat, Sassan Tabatabai - translator, Sassan Tabatabai - introduction
Narrated by: Ramiz Monsef, Sassan Tabatabai
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £7.99

Buy Now for £7.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

 A new English translation of one of the most important, controversial Iranian novels of the twentieth century

Winner of the 2023 Lois Roth Persian Translation Award

A Penguin Classic

Written by one of the greatest Iranian writers of the twentieth century, Blind Owl tells a two-part story of an isolated narrator with a fragile relationship with time and reality. In first person, the narrator offers a string of hazy, dreamlike recollections fueled by opium and alcohol. He spends time painting the exact same scene on the covers of pen cases: an old man wearing a cape and turban sitting under a cypress tree, separated by a small stream from a beautiful woman in black who offers him a water lily. In a one-page transition, the reader finds the narrator covered in blood and waiting for the police to arrest him. In part two, readers glimpse the grim realities that unlock the mysteries of the first part. In a new translation that reflects Hedayat’s conversational, confessional tone, Blind Owl joins the ranks of classics by Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky that explore the dark recesses of the human psyche. Classics Crime Crime Thrillers Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Thriller & Suspense Thriller Suspense

Listeners also enjoyed...

 The Blind Owl cover art
My Uncle Napoleon cover art
Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe cover art
The Castle cover art
The Fascination cover art
Hunger cover art
The Mirror of My Heart cover art
Invitation to a Beheading cover art
Pale Fire cover art
Your Ad Could Go Here cover art
In a Lonely Place cover art
A Sand Book cover art
When We Were Orphans cover art
Burning Girls and Other Stories cover art
In the Dust of This Planet cover art
Nobber cover art

Critic reviews

“a much-needed and clear translation”
—Amir-Hussein Radjy, The New York Times

“The eerie, phantasmal Blind Owl…possesses the fully dimensional oddness of a vivid dream, which one can mine for interpretations, analyze for influences or simply submit to.”
—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
All stars
Most relevant
This was, in a word, insane. It’s a downward spiral of paranoia, dissociation and madness. I’m still not entirely sure what happened, but I couldn’t stop listening. Utterly compelling.

A descent into madness

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.