A Note from the Author
I am Mohamad Hosein Naghdi, Mohamad H Naghdi on my book covers, and most people in Canberra know me first as a barber. Every working day I stand at a chair in Gem Barber, the barbershop I co-own in the heart of the city, and I listen. A barber hears a great deal: the small victories, the quiet worries, the stories people tell when they are looking at themselves in the mirror and not quite at you. I never planned for that chair to become a writing desk, but over the years it has taught me more about people than any book could.
Tazhib, the Patience of Gold
Alongside barbering I practise tazhib, the traditional Persian art of illumination, and tash’ir, its companion art of the margins. I began in 2010, learning privately from two masters of the craft, Master Bidabadi and Master Moharrami, illuminators and miniaturists whose patience I still try to imitate. Tazhib is slow work. A single panel can take weeks of fine brushwork in watercolour and gouache, gold leaf laid down a hair’s breadth at a time, and there is no hurrying it. That slowness has shaped the way I write. My illuminated paintings hang in the barbershop, where they are seen, discussed and sometimes bought by people who came in only for a haircut. A selection of them is on the Tazhib & Tash’ir page.
Writing Invented With Love
Invented With Love is my first novella. It began with a question I could not put down: what happens to a man who has spent his whole life watching rather than taking part, when the world begins, quietly, to watch him back? Silas, the man at the centre of the book, imagines lives for the strangers he passes on trams and behind shop windows. He is comfortable being background. Then something shifts, and the safety of going unnoticed is gone. I wanted to write a quiet, unsettling story about perception and identity, about the thin line between what is real and what we invent and about the strange courage it takes to be seen.
I read the audiobook myself. A story arrives differently when it is heard in the voice that wrote it, with its pauses and its hesitations left in, and I wanted readers to have that choice.
Where to Find the Book
Invented With Love is published in three editions: a paperback distributed through IngramSpark to bookshops and libraries worldwide, an eBook and an audiobook. It is available on Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, Google Play Books, Kobo, Spotify and Audible. If you would like to begin, the first chapter, The Observer, is on this website to read or to listen to, and I would be glad to know what you make of it.
A barber, an illuminator and a writer sound like three different people. I have come to think of them as one occupation practised with different tools: paying close attention to a person, a line of gold or a sentence until it becomes what it was meant to be.
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