Here's a list of Iranian-themed books, lovingly compiled and reviewed by BookHampton's own William Taylor:
The Shahnameh
by Abolqasem Ferdowsi (translated by Dick Davis)
The Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, the most esteemed poet in all of Persian literature, occupies a central place in the Iranian national imagination; perhaps the only comparison one can make is to the role of the Homeric epics in the life of Greece. Other poets are venerated for their mystic hymns or odes to earthly pleasures, but Ferdowsi alone captured the glorious sweep of Iran's epic history.
Though grandly told, his tales of kings and wars are filled with humor, irony, and human foibles, and are colored by a lament for an independent past that was swept away when Arab invaders brought a new faith to the land in the seventh century. His work is filled with an ambivalence towards orthodox beliefs that can surprise readers today.
(translated by Peter Avery and John Heath-Stubbs)
The Rubaiyat was once known to millions in the English-speaking world through the medium of Edward Fitzgerald's beautiful but paraphrastic adaptation. It's popularity declined in the twentieth century, inexplicably, but surely now is a time to take another look, perhaps in the recent faithful translation of Avery and Heath-Stubbs.
Omar Khayyam was a mathematician, an astronomer, a drinker, and a poet; this last vocation he might have rated the least worthy, though anyone who ever been beguiled by a line of his would have to disagree. We cannot be faithful readers of the Rubaiyat and claim that it will abide forever, for no poet has ever been clearer than Khayyam on the absolute brevity and impermanence of life; but surely as long as mortals have eyes to see and hearts that break, they will turn and turn again to this volume that charms and chills with its irreligious insights.

Robert Byron was rather distant kin to the other more famous Byron, but he shared with his lordly relation a longing for exotic lands and a biting sarcasm about the journeys required to get to them. The Road to Oxiana is the story of an architecture-obsessed adventure in Central Asia that took him through Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, and the length and breadth of Iran. The country at the time (1934 or thereabouts) was in the process of being fitfully modernised by Reza Khan, the despotic former Cossack who elevated himself to the first Shah of the Pahlavi dynasty. Byron slyly refers to the All-Hearing Shah as "Marjoribanks" as he secretly records his witty criticisms.
THE BLIND OWL by Sadegh Hedayat
Sadegh Hedayat may have been the greatest Iranian writer of the twentieth century – he was certainly the most experimental – but in his life he was rejected by his countrymen and almost unheard of by foreigners. His following has grown in the years since his suicide in Paris in 1951, but his haunting symbolist works remain banned in his homeland. One only has to read his novel THE BLIND OWL to see why. The story is of one man's descent into opium-fueled madness, possesed by the memory of the fleetingly glimpsed eyes of a phantasmic woman, the only soul he has ever loved. Hedayat's still-shocking prose owes a debt to Edgar Allen Poe and the French Decadents, but he fuses their inspiration with an authentically Persian sense of the tragedy of existence.
ALL THE SHAH'S MEN by Stephen Kinzer
A well-researched and highly readably account, by a long-time Middle Eastern reporter, of Iran's brief moment of liberal democracy under the nationalist, reforming premiership of Mohammed Mosadegh in the 1950s, and of the terribly misguided Western-backed coup that reinstated the Shah as Iran's autocratic leader. This sorry tale, which remains embarassingly ill-known in the two countries most responsible for it – America and Britain – continues to resound in the Iranian consciousness.
MY UNCLE NAPOLEON by Iraj Pezeshkzad
It's nice to turn from the (admittedly unavoidable) tragic side of Iranian history to one of the great comic novels in the Persian language, which appeared in the final years before the convulsive Revolution at the end of the 1970s. This portrait of a family afflicted by the eccentric energies of its Dear Uncle will remind some readers of that great American classic The Confederacy of Dunces, others of the finest works of Wodehouse and Waugh.
THE SHAH OF SHAHS by Ryszard Kapuściński
A brief but brilliant account of the 1979 Islamic Revolution that combines Kapuściński's impressions of his travels in Iran with stories wrought from Iranian citizens, along with a scrapbook of collated historical horrors. The backbone of the book explores how the massive corruption of the monarchical regime, combined with the terrors induced by the Shah's secret police, so deformed Iran's once tolerant and sceptical society that the masses turned themselves over to clerical zealots for their salvation. In addition to history and journalistic anecdote, Kapuściński probes into the analytical question of the nature of revolution. The common cause of all revolution, he observes, is that at a certain moment the people, almost by accident, lose their fear – and at that moment tyranny becomes powerless over them.
-- William Taylor