Every book I've read by Nahid Rachlin (and as one of her editors, I've even read a couple books yet to be published) transports me completely. I don't know if all these years of reading and editing and analyzing manuscripts has made it more difficult for me to be transported by fiction. Perhaps. But with Nahid Rachlin, I know that it's due to the sheer beauty of her prose, the coolness, the clarity of her craftsmanship, the understated emotions, and her spectacular eye for detail. The pomegranate trees, with fruit bursting on the branch to reveal jewel-like seeds. The gurgling waters of the joob. The fresh fruit in the bazaars piled high--glistening grapes, fresh dates, persimmons. Better than any other writer writing about Iran, or even any country in the region, Rachlin brings the everyday Iranian's experience to light--men and women. V.S. Naipul said of this book that it's brilliant because it's not overtly political--politics are not even mentioned--and that Rachlin's understated prose provides the more powerful political statement.

On the face of it, this is a story of a women in transition, pulled to her homeland at a time of personal flux. She's moved to the United States, where she has a successful career as a biologist and is married to an American man who seems distant, changeable, cold. She realizes, while visiting her father and his second wife, that her mother hadn't just disappeared, as he'd always told her. Instead, she'd left the family for another man. Feri, the main character, eventually finds her mother in another town, and it's this meeting that proves to be the catalyst for the rest of the novel.

But this is almost beside the point. It's rare to find a writer these days who writes "quietly"--who doesn't feel the need to cartwheel across the page, tap-dance through chapters, engage in a continual performance aimed at keeping the reader's interest. In Foreigner, and in all of Nahid Rachlin's other work, the deep sense of place (and a true sense of Iran) and the elegant portrayal of women, in particular, haunts your days and nights in the most pleasant way imaginable. ( )

The author portrays an intimate insider’s knowledge of everyday Iran- of people and places, houses, streets, and families- and she writes of them with a clarity of perception and style that makes them instantly recognizable and even homely and familiar to the reader.