“Mehri Yalfani’s A Palace in Paradise fills an important gap in contemporary fiction, bringing the Irani-Canadian diaspora into critical focus through a predominantly female cast of characters–émigrés who seek in Toronto and its environs a space of refuge and forgetting, while discovering, among a community of exiles still shackled to the shadow of history, that it is only in those quiet acts of will, like those private acts of kindness, that we possess the power to set ourselves free.”
–Mariam Pirbhai, Professor, Wilfrid Laurier University, and award-winning author of Outside People and Other Stories

“A Palace in Paradise leaps off the page with its compelling storyline of human endurance. This deeply humane novel allows the reader an intimate glimpse into the world of Iranian immigrants and refugees in present-day Toronto, their hopes and fears, their strengths and weaknesses, their joys and despair, as each in his or her own way tries to cope with the upheaval of former lives and adjustment to new lives. The struggles of Parvaneh, an empathetic social worker, and her husband, Mahan, and their circle of friends and acquaintances, especially Ferdous and Nadereh, are magnified by backgrounds of anguish and guilt, as well as relationships made more complex by betrayal of husbands and lovers. Their task is to overcome the past and find a way to go forward into the future. That some do find a way to live and even find happiness is a credit to the human spirit.”
–Cecelia Frey, author of Lovers Fall Back to Earth and The Long White Sickness