Nahid Rachlin

"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... Miss Rachlin shows us not only the tranquil inner courtyards with sweets and gossip exchanged by the fishpond, the flower bedecked bridal chamber, but also the political, social and religious factions contending for primacy in the streets outside... Minou is a dreamy literary girl... like other yearning heroines from Dorothea Brooke to Emma Bovary, she wants more than conventional marriage..."

"Married to a Stranger seems to me such a clear statement and all of one pieces--a direct cry, as it were, from out of a particular feminine sensibility. Reading the book, one feels one knows what it is like to be a girl growing up to be a woman in urban, 'modern' Iran; and knows it not from the outside, as from a sociological survey, but from within a living experience... Nahid Rachlin has refined her prose... by giving it the clarity and spare sensuousness of Persian poetry or miniature painting."


"Like the novels of Jane Austen, Married to a Stranger is presented entirely from a female point of view. But this is not a story just for women. The larger dimensions of this book's plot--the struggle of an intelligent, likeable young person... is one of the great themes of the novel to which both sexes can easily relate..."


"... Rachlin's own experiences enriched her ability to convey so convincingly the thoughts, feelings, and observations of an intelligent young woman seeking personal freedom in an oppressive society."