Nahid Rachlin has an intimate insider's knowledge of present-day 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. -- Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Rachlin's prose carefully understates and suggests her heroine's awakening to a pervasive atmosphere of menace and sensuality; residue of a culture she thinks she has abandoned, but which continues to claim her. -- Bruce Allen, Chicago Tribune Foreigner gently raises new as well as timeless questions about an unhappy woman's faith and freedom. -- The New Yorker Conveys the texture of extended family, the stress of modernization, the strain of Moslem rigidity as well as the harmony of nature, of dust and carpets, fruits, sweets, tea, fine rice and gossip. Always gossip. -- Eden Lipson, Special Edition, WNET/Thirteen