Description
Book SynopsisAcclaimed 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;
Trade Review
A deeply felt portrait of a particular place and its people . . . The stark, protean beauty of Shidmehr’s writing recalls the shape-shifting work of Denis Johnson’s collection Jesus’ Son . . . Shidmehr’s is a necessary, feminist voice that is at once defiant and humbling. * Quill and Quire *
Showcases an impressive range. * Vancouver Sun *
Divided Loyalties offers an in-depth view into the complex traditions, taboos, and social mores of Iranian society from the 1970s to the present day. * Winnipeg Free Press *
Divided Loyalties should be required reading. * Refinery29 *
Shidmehr’s sentences are complex and packed with information, at once crystal clear and highly nuanced, metaphoric and ruthlessly specific, held together by powerfully resonant central images that reverberate retroactively and knit together many levels of reference and meaning … These are stories of ordinary lives, starkly rendered and held in tender suspension, often between a ‘home’ which is beloved yet toxic, and an ‘away’ that is lonely and insulting in its oppressiveness. Panoramic yet intimate, they enact a kind of investigative surgery, each one plunging beneath the surface of a situation and penetrating it to the cellular level before re-emerging only a few minutes or hours later to reveal the context surrounding what has come to pass. * EVENT Magazine *
