The Mourners of Bayal is a collection of eight interrelated stories centered around the people of Bayal, an imaginary Iranian village in the middle of nowhere. This work is a penetrating allegory of the manners, beliefs, hopes, and desperations of rural Iranians in the early seventies. The Mourners of Bayal is a very early example of magical realism.

Gholām-Hossein Sā'edi was a prolific Iranian writer. He published over forty books, representing his talents in the fiction genres of drama (under the pen name Gohar Morad or Gowhar Murad according to Library of Congress transliteration]), the novel, the screenplay, and the short story in addition to the non-fiction genres of cultural criticism, travel literature and ethnography.