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It’s difficult in 2026 to talk about Iran without confronting a lot of crude certainty. The average non-Iranian gets their information in snippets, filtered by algorithms. The Iranian diaspora is too fractured and traumatised to educate everyone. And the regime has muffled the voices inside its borders, responding to every major uprising with internet blackouts that hide both the people’s rage and its own violent response. Meanwhile, its own network of misinformation spreads lies – that protesters are foreign instruments, that the unrest is manufactured by outsiders – exploiting legitimate western anxieties about intervention, Islamophobia, sanctions, oil and Israeli imperialism.

Bozorgmehr Sharafedin and Yeganeh Torbati’s powerful history of the Islamic republic is a badly needed corrective because it is at once an engrossing story and a balanced, meticulously researched primer on modern Iran (the clearest I’ve ever read). And it is dramatic, personal and often heartbreaking, told through six lives lived at the forefront of the Iranian people’s almost five-decade struggle with a corrupt regime that has stolen their freedoms, votes and many thousands of their lives.

In the 1979 revolution that toppled the Shah, the clerics united Iran’s many unhappy factions by promising independence from western influence and economic prosperity (the first supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, “declared that ‘no one must remain without a dwelling in this country’ and promised to ensure free electricity and water for the poor”). But, in the place of the monarchy, Khomeini and his acolytes built a mafia state that instituted gender apartheid, worsened every social injustice, killed the arts, decimated living standards, and isolated Iranians from the global culture and economy.

Once in power, Khomeini quickly abandoned his revolutionary promises. After just seven months, he said: “No wise person can imagine that we sacrificed our blood so that melons would become cheap, [that] we gave our youth so that housing would become affordable … Our saints also gave up their lives for Islam, not for economics.” One former disciple said it was like “watching my father slowly turn into an alcoholic … The drug this time was power.”

In June 1989, when Khomeini died, the new supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, claimed the same absolute authority. Sharafedin and Torbati deftly use their six protagonists’ lives to throw this period of change into relief.

In the 90s, Mehdi Karroubi, a revolutionary cleric turned dissident, comes to terms with the mistakes of ’79 and his growing distaste for the notion of a single divine authority. He rises up the ranks of government, often challenging Khamenei’s hardliners. Young poet and activist Hila Sedighi, too, believes that change might come through elections and diplomacy. But the reformists have little power. “They do not listen to me,” says the popular president, Mohammad Khatami, who is too afraid even to talk to US President Bill Clinton in a UN corridor. He ducks into a bathroom and hides until Clinton gives up.

As they slowly push the reformists out, the hardliners stop pretending to be running a democracy. High-level bureaucrats flaunt their wealth more boldly. The clerics empower “the [Revolutionary] Guards to enrich themselves”, turning a military police force into a business empire that competes for government contracts and runs smuggling networks to overcome sanctions.

“Khamenei’s alliance with the armed forces [was] a point of no return. ‘With this level of power, they will no longer submit to elections,’ the pragmatic former president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, says. ‘We should never have allowed it to reach this point.’” The elections of 2005 and 2009 prove him right. They are obviously rigged for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (his 2005 vote count in part of one province added up to 137% of eligible voters). In June 2009, Sedighi becomes a leading voice of the Green Movement, as millions of peaceful protesters take to the streets to demand: “Where is my vote?” But the protests are quashed. The reformist candidates, Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi, are placed under house arrest. The reformist era is over.

Amir Moghadam (an idealistic bureaucrat who turns against his corrupt boss) and Said Rahmani (a tech entrepreneur who tries to keep his operations above board) represent an unfamiliar chapter of the story for me. During the startup boom of the mid-2010s, young, educated Iranians return from Europe and North America speaking a corporate patois, with English words such as “ecosystem”, “platform” and “runway” peppering their Farsi, and briefly Iran’s brain drain seems to slow. It doesn’t last long. Soon the regime makes its hostile designs on their profits clear and most of them leave.

Then, in the turbulent 2020s, a secular, social media generation wants nothing to do with religious ideals or the promise of reform. The internet has shown them “that they had been blocked from the simplest and most profound experiences that their counterparts elsewhere took for granted: kissing their sweethearts in public, walking along a beach”. After years of economic protests and the utter mismanagement of the Covid pandemic, Mahsa Amini’s 2022 death in custody sparks the Woman Life Freedom movement, the most geographically widespread uprising since the revolution. Rozhin Yousefzadeh and Kosar Eftekhari are among those who take to the streets and publicly refuse to wear hijab. Both pay a heavy price. Yousefzadeh is one of the first to be imprisoned for speaking out about Amini’s death and Eftekhari is blinded in one eye by Revolutionary Guards.

These movements are homegrown and deep-rooted, each building on the lessons and mistakes of previous generations. In present-day Iran, it’s no longer religious minorities or women or young liberals protesting: it is Muslims, old men, parents, the poor. Stolen Revolution is a careful and unwavering account of the regime’s absurdities and crimes. It should be required reading for anyone who cares about human rights or justice in the Middle East.

Sharafedin and Torbati end with the Israeli strikes of 2025. Khamenei, goes into hiding while Iranians deal with complex emotions, rallying together to survive while also hoping that this time something will topple the beast on their backs. “Is it still busy outside?” Rozhin and her cellmates ask new prisoners during the Woman Life Freedom protests, eager to be reassured that the demonstrations are continuing. They aren’t. A prison employee wheels in the “happiness cart”, dispensing diazepam and clonazepam.

• Dina Nayeri is author of The Ungrateful Refugee and Who Gets Believed? Stolen Revolution: Betrayal and Hope in Modern Iran by Bozorgmehr Sharafedin and Yeganeh Torbati is published by Viking (£22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.