A woman's struggle for self-realization in contemporary Iran, a novel with "the clarity and spare sensuousness of Persian poetry or miniature painting."—Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

When Minou Hakini marries a man of her own choosing—an intellectual and a radical—and moves to Abadan, a thriving oil town near the Iraqi border, she imagines her life will be adventurous and liberating. Before long, however, she becomes aware of her husband's suspicious liaisons and dangerous activities. Her struggle to forge her own identity as a woman in contemporary Iran is charged with passion, anger and finally a need to escape.

“The ecstasies and disillusionments of first love are the stuff of great tragedies and cheap romances, but Nahid Rachlin has done something else with this familiar theme, and something more, though her style is elegantly simple . . . ”—The New York Times Book Review

" . . . Rachlin (Foreigner) tells her story with economy and suspensefulness, weaving strands of unstable political life and sexual secrecy—in a small, vivid closeup of life in Iran at that fateful hour, within a society that had become its own prisoner."—Kirkus Reviews

Nahid Rachlin is an Iranian-American who lives in New York and teaches at Barnard College. She is the author of Foreigner and The Heart's Desire, both novels, and Veils, a collection of short stories.