<London, November 17: Iran has decided to ban the publication of Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez's latest novel titled 'Memories of My Melancholy Whores'.
First published in Farsi as 'Memories of My Melancholy Sweethearts' in 2004, the first edition of 5,000 had sold out within three weeks, before Iranian authorities realised.
According to the BBC, the novel tells the story of a man who wants to mark his 90th birthday by sleeping with a 14-year-old virgin in a brothel and ends up falling in love.
The aged man, who had always slept with prostitutes, wants on the night he turns 90 to give himself a night of "wild love" with an adolescent virgin.
A brothel madam finds a girl for him, but when he arrives at the brothel the girl is asleep. From then on, he spends every night watching the girl sleep, finding love at the end of his life.
Iran's culture ministry said a "bureaucratic error" had led to permission being granted for the book's publication, the Fars news agency reported.
The official responsible had been sacked, Fars said.
The release of the book has angered religious conservatives, forcing the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, which must approve all publications in Iran, to refuse to issue a permit to allow the book to be reprinted.
Iran has tightened censorship of books since President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to power in 2005. abriel Garcia Marquez, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, is popular in Iran, which has published many of his books, including One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera.
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