The Bread Season is a collection of six realistic stories, each narrated by a teenage school boy from a very poor working class family, describing his hard labor during summer holidays and everlasting starvation.

Ali Ashraf Darvishian was an Iranian story writer and scholar. After finishing teacher-training college, he taught at the poverty-stricken villages of Gilan-e-Gharb and Shah Abad (nowadays called Islam Abad). This atmosphere is featured in most of his stories. Later, he moved to Tehran and continued his studies in Persian literature