Stealing Nasreen.(Book review)

STEALING NASREEN

FARZANA DOCTOR

Inanna Publications

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Verdict: This is a lovely piece of work, comely in its appeal, confident in its address. It's a work of love and longing and loss, and also of reconciliation and rejuvenation. In a voice that is completely assured of itself, Farzana Doctor weaves a tale of new and old immigrants in the impersonal and impervious megapolis that is Toronto.

Threading their lives together is the skein of attraction, that old faithful, which can transform the relentless routine of urban living into a web of intrigue and intimate desires--some declared, some lurking just under the surface of the skin and some that reach their plane of fulfillment.

Shaffiq and Salma, chasing that now-undeliverable Canadian dream, find their lives enmeshed with that of Nasreen, the savvy second-generation therapist, in ways that will reveal to them all their secret selves and unearth some of their forgotten histories. Anyone who has ever undertaken the difficult and courageous journey of psychotherapy will recognize in this novel the value of uttering the word that unlocks the key to the interior ...