The portrayal of Muslim women in the growing literature on the Iran-Iraq War (22 September 1980–20 August 1988), as an ideological reservoir, has been and still remains a highly debatable issue as well as a large academic gap. The experience of female captives or soldiers as marginal issue in gender-specific genre, namely war literature, has made female narratives a popular and controversial topic of discussion among literary scholars and critics. In a similar vein, the current study explores, for the first time, the most salient textual, pictorial and paratextual elements on a book cover of an Iranian bestseller, a memoir of a female prisoner of war in the Iran-Iraq Conflict, Ma`sumah Abad’s Man Zindah’am (2013; I’m Alive, forthcoming). Belonging to war literature and the post-revolutionary Iranian culture (after 1979), the book benefits from the attention of large, diverse audiences or readerships because of reinforcing and subverting discourses embedded in its text and paratext. Relying on the interconnection between ideology and sign, the current study utilizes Althusser’s concept of interpellation and Barthes’ semiotic model to examine the ideological, aesthetic, and commercial strategies operating in the paratextual elements on this book cover. The present research also offers some insight into the cover illustration of this national bestseller surrounding a feminine identity. It offers space to compare and contrast this image of femininity with a female image on the book cover of another bestseller in Iran, interestingly again a memoir of war detailing Sayyidah Zahra Husseini’s experiences during the Iran–Iraq War, entitled as Da [2008; One Woman’s War: Da (Mother), 2014]. The paper concludes that not only ideology, but also women’s new voice in war literature have constituted a step forward in the Muslim heroine’s evolution toward autonomy. This autonomy is portrayed inside and on the two national bestsellers that still continue to sell thousands of copies each year.

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