Divided Loyalties
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Acclaimed poet Nilofar Shidmehr’s debut story collection is an unflinching look at the lives of women in post-revolutionary Iran and the contemporary diaspora in Canada.
The stories begin in 1978, the year before the Iranian Revolution. In a neighbourhood in Tehran, a group of affluent girls play a Cinderella game with unexpected consequences. In the mid 1980s, women help their husbands and brothers survive war and political upheaval. In the early 1990s in Vancouver, Canada, a single-mother refugee is harassed by the men she meets on a telephone dating platform. And in 2003, a Canadian woman working for an international aid organization is dispatched to her hometown of Bam to assist in the wake of a devastating earthquake.
At once powerful and profound, Divided Loyalties depicts the rich lives of Iranian women and girls in post-revolutionary Iran and the contemporary diaspora in Canada; the enduring complexity of the expectations forced upon them; and the resilience of a community experiencing the turmoil of war, revolution, and migration.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Each of these nine short stories centres around a different complicated and emotive Iranian (or Iranian Canadian) woman. And each story—whether set in an office in Canada or on the riverbanks of war-torn Tehran—has a gut-wrenching element. In “Yellow Light,” an innocent moment goes awry when a wife attempts to video-record her sleeping husband, a newly released political prisoner. And in “Sign Language as a Second Language,” a woman is relieved to find her bank teller is deaf—he can’t judge her Farsi accent. Nilofar Shidmehr’s debut carves out a new space for contemporary Iranian history and identity in Canadian literature.
