Rachlin Nahid

An Iranian family embroiled in Islamic revolution, the hostage crisis, incest, and exile in America Forced to flee the country with their parents as Khomeini rises to power, Nora and Jahan Ellahi rise to the challenge of anti-Iranian hostility in America. Breaking free from their intense attachment to each other, they explore new relationships to forge independent lives. The romantic artist Jahan ultimately returns to join the army to fight Iraq, while ambitious Nora finds a life of greater opportunity and personal freedom in the U.S. "If, as Aristotle reminds us, we are our desire, then who are we if the object of our desire is forbidden? What becomes of us if we are born in one world yet long for another? These are just two of the complex and difficult questions Nahid Rachlin explores and ultimately illuminates in this brave, engrossing, and timely novel. I recommend it highly!" -- Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and FogJumping Over Fire is a political novel with a strong dose of Wuthering Heights blended into it ...potent subject matter ..." -- The Seattle Times "Complexities of Iranian culture, recent history, and current events create a vivid background for a moving and suspenseful story...wise and timely novel." -- School Library Journal "As always, Nahid's writing keeps you on the end of your seat and is filled with emotion...The story unfolds with surprise. What makes the book even more meaningful is that it is about a family of meager wealth rather than very affluent. It is a family, however, with complications that arise from their new homeland. Do they survive? That is for you to find out." -- Persian Heritage Magazine "Besides being 'page-turners', Rachlin's novels render, in abundance, the beauty and sensuousness of Persian culture." -- New Letters Nahid Rachlin is the Iranian-American author of the novels Foreigner, The Heart's Desire, Married to a Stranger and the short story collection Veils. She teaches at the New School University and the Unterberg Poetry Center in New York.

A woman's struggle for self-realization in contemporary Iran, a novel with "the clarity and spare sensuousness of Persian poetry or miniature painting."-Ruth Prawer Jhabvala When Minou Hakini marries a man of her own choosing--an intellectual and a radical--and moves to Abadan, a thriving oil town near the Iraqi border, she imagines her life will be adventurous and liberating. Before long, however, she becomes aware of her husband's suspicious liaisons and dangerous activities. Her struggle to forge her own identity as a woman in contemporary Iran is charged with passion, anger, and finally a need to escape. "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 ..." --The New York Times Book Review "...Rachlin (Foreigner) tells her story with economy and suspensefulness, weaving strands of unstable political life and sexual secrecy--in a small, vivid closeup of life in Iran at that fateful hour, within a society that had become its own prisoner." --Kirkus Reviews Nahid Rachlin is an Iranian-American who lives in New York and teaches at Barnard College. She is the author of Foreigner and The Heart's Desire, both novels, and Veils, a collection of short stories.