Nahid Rachlin

A searing portrait of forced girlhood and generational grief, Given Away reveals the quiet strength of a woman surviving child marriage and motherhood in 1930s Iran. In 1930s Iran, ten-year-old Mehri is given away in marriage, the first step in a life shaped by forced motherhood, loss, and sacrifice. Alone and afraid, she navigates married life far from the support of her mother and sisters. Pregnant by thirteen, Mehri bears child after child, losing many along the way, and struggles to mother her five surviving children through a haze of grief. In Given Away, Nahid Rachlin traces the hidden scars of her family’s history, carved by a system that grants men complete control and strips women of their voices. Yet within that silence, Rachlin reveals a quiet resistance rooted in sisterhood, love, and endurance.

A searing portrait of forced girlhood and generational grief, Given Away reveals the quiet strength of a woman surviving child marriage and motherhood in 1930s Iran. In 1930s Iran, ten-year-old Mehri is given away in marriage, the first step in a life shaped by forced motherhood, loss, and sacrifice. Alone and afraid, she navigates married life far from the support of her mother and sisters. Pregnant by thirteen, Mehri bears child after child, losing many along the way, and struggles to mother her five surviving children through a haze of grief. In Given Away, Nahid Rachlin traces the hidden scars of her family’s history, carved by a system that grants men complete control and strips women of their voices. Yet within that silence, Rachlin reveals a quiet resistance rooted in sisterhood, love, and endurance.

Set in contemporary Iran, Mirage delves into the complicated relationship between Roya and her identical twin sister, Tala. Their inseparable bond becomes hard to maintain as they grow older, but when they both get pregnant at the same time, their relationship is rekindled. After an accident causes Roya to miscarry and Tala to go into labor, grief, jealousy, suspicion, and guilt fracture that recently renewed relationship. Delving deep into the human psyche, Nahid Rachlin intricately explores themes of sisterly identity, betrayal, envy, depression, loss, and the impact of memories. Like Ottessa Moshfegh's Death in Her Hands (Penguin Press, 2020), Mirage artfully juxtaposes the sociopolitical dynamics of contemporary Iran with a story of the nature of grief and redemption that will take firm hold of your heart.

For many years, heartache prevented Nahid Rachlin from turning her sharp novelist's eye inward: to tell the story of how her own life diverged from that of her closest confidante and beloved sister, Pari. Growing up in Iran, both refused to accept traditional Muslim mores, and dreamed of careers in literature and on the stage. Their lives changed abruptly when Pari was coerced by their father into marrying a wealthy and cruel suitor. Nahid narrowly avoided a similar fate, and instead negotiated with him to pursue her studies in America. When Nahid received the unsettling and mysterious news that Pari had died after falling down a light of stairs, she traveled back to Iran-now under the Islamic regime-to find out what happened to her truest friend, confront her past, and evaluate what the future holds for the heartbroken in a tale of crushing sorrow, sisterhood, and ultimately, hope.

"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"

Jennifer Sahary, an American artist, and her husband Karim, a professor and Iranian immigrant, make an extended visit to Teheran shortly after the Iran-Iraq War, encountering unforeseen dangers and sexual temptations that change the course of their lives. When their young son is taken by his grandmother to the holy city of Qom without Jennifer's knowledge, she sets out to find him, learning much about Iran and about herself along the way. And as Karim renews contact with his family and surveys the misery and needs of his war-torn country, he begins to question where he can best achieve his ideals. In sensuous and elegant prose, Rachlin weaves the interlinking stories of a man and a woman and their contrasting cultures with balance and sympathy. "One can learn a lot from this novel ..."-- Publishers Weekly Nahid Rachlin is an Iranian who lives in New York City, where she teaches creative writing at Barnard College. She is author of Veils: Short Stories and Married to a Stranger (both published by City Lights) and Foreigner (W. W. Norton). She teaches at the New School University and the Unterberg Poetry Center in New York.