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If, like me, your perception of the recently “elected” president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, toggles between enigma and madman, you might try Ahmadinejad: The Secret History of Iran's Radical Leader, by Kasra Naji (University of California Press), a nuanced account of the forces driving the apocalyptic vision of this son of a … blacksmith. Or there's The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the State of Iran, by Israeli journalists Yossi Melman and Meir Javedanfar (Carroll & Graf), very good on his messianic belief that he will usher in the age of the Shiite Mahdi.

On Iran's quest to go nuclear, try Allah's Bomb: The Islamic Quest for Nuclear Weapons, an investigative work by Al J. Venter (Lyons Press), or the more academic Iran and the Bomb: the Abdication of International Responsibility, by French nuclear security expert Thérèse Delpech (Columbia University Press), who discusses the plans and probabilities for Iran and for its Western and Arab opponents.

Even though Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameini seems obsessed with the British, it's the Great Satan that, despite President Obama's careful overtures, is Iran's greatest obstacle. In Confronting Iran: The Failure of American Foreign Policy and the Next Great Conflict in the Middle East (Basic Books), historian Ali M. Ansari chronicles the fraught diplomatic relationships between the two countries, from the CIA-backed overthrow of Mossadeq in 1953 up to the present.

Several books probe this difficult country. In The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: the Paradox of Modern Iran (Doubleday), Iranian-born U.S. writer Hooman Majd offers a subtle account of an Iran at once ancient and modern, Muslim, Shiite and Persian. In Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic (Times Books), Ray Tayekh covers much of the same ground, but with greater emphasis on external policy.

For ideological background combined with diplomatic policy, there's Iran in World Politics: the Question of the Islamic Republic (Columbia University Press), by the University of London's Arshin Adib-Moghaddam.

In Mirrors of the Unseen: Journeys in Iran, British travel writer Jason Elliot (St. Martin's) delivers a sharply observed, many-sided account of three years of travel in a country that gradually reveals its pleasures and problems, not to mention its people.

Speaking of Iran's people, there's the timely Warring Souls: Youth, Media and Martyrdom in Post-Revolutionary Iran, by Roxanne Varzi (Duke University Press), an anthropologist's look at the generation that has come of age since the 1979 Khomeini revolution, and which belies the view that Islamic values dominate Iran. That view is at least in part confirmed in Nasrin Alavi's enjoyable and often moving We Are Iran: the Persian Blogs (Raincoast), in which Internet diaries and blogs present a very different Iran from the police state of conservative mullahs and the thuggish Basij. This is the Iran that I for one hope will prevail.

Martin Levin is the editor of the Globe and Mail's Books section.