Things Left Unsaid by Sara Jafari
Published 2023 · 92,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction, Romance, Diaspora Fiction
How hard is Things Left Unsaid to read?
Things Left Unsaid scores 38 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 30 out of 100
- Jafari writes in plain, contemporary British English with no archaic or specialized vocabulary. Persian words for family and food appear untranslated but in context, similar to how genre-adjacent diaspora fiction handles code-switching without demanding a glossary.
- Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
- Sentences are short to medium and declarative, in the unadorned register reviewers compare to Sally Rooney. There is no nesting or subordination that would slow a reader down; the prose favors clarity over ornament.
- Abstraction: 42 out of 100
- The novel stays grounded in scene and dialogue but spends real time in Shirin's interiority — her self-esteem, her ambivalence about belonging — which pushes it past pure plot mechanics without ever turning philosophical or essayistic.
- Information density: 35 out of 100
- This is a character-and-relationship novel with a single family/romance throughline, not a book stacking subplots or reference. A reader tracks two timelines and a handful of named people, well within comfortable range.
- Narrative indirection: 48 out of 100
- The 'painful events' that separated Shirin and Kian as teenagers are withheld and doled out through alternating past chapters rather than stated upfront, forcing readers to piece together what happened alongside the present-day reunion.
- Symbolic density: 28 out of 100
- The book operates in grounded realism — a house party, a publishing office, a dying grandmother in Tehran — rather than through motif or allegory. Meaning sits in what characters do and don't say to each other, not in symbolic objects.
- Ironic distance: 22 out of 100
- The register is sincere and close to Shirin's point of view throughout; there is no gap between what the narration reports and what the author wants us to feel about it, aside from the mild social irony of a 'diverse' publisher sidelining its own editor.
- Resolution withholding: 38 out of 100
- The Shirin-Kian question resolves in the way second-chance romance readers expect, but the surrounding material — grief for her grandmother, the compromises of working in a performatively diverse industry — is left more open than tied off.
- Structural complexity: 56 out of 100
- The novel alternates between Shirin's present-day London chapters and past chapters centered on Kian and his family in Hull, a genuine dual-timeline, dual-focus structure rather than simple flashback within a single throughline.
How Things Left Unsaid is regarded
Things Left Unsaid holds a literary regard score of 22 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.