A young woman poses for the cover of a magazine. A Canadian soldier serving in Kandahar falls in love with her photograph and sends her an email. The Darling of Kandahar tells a story of love, loss, and displacement against the background of the war in Afghanistan, of the founding of the city of Montreal — and of a city now crowded with immigrants. When Felicia Mihali's first novel appeared in French in 2002, it was compared to Marie-Claire Blais's masterpiece, A Season in the Life of Emmanuel. Making her English-language début with The Darling of Kandahar, Mihali now joins Nancy Huston as one of the few writers working in English as well as French.

Felicia Mihali is a Montreal writer, translator and Éditions Hashtag publisher who studies French, English, Chinese and Dutch along with postcolonial literature and history. Her first novel, Le pays du fromage, was published in 2002 by XYZ Éditeur, followed by six other works written in French. In 2012, she published her first book in English, The Darling of Kandahar (LLP), which was nominated for Canada Reads as one the year's best novels. The must-read 2021 novel Pineapple Kisses in Iqaluit appeared simultaneously in French as Une nuit d’amour à Iqaluit, and Judith Weisz Woodsworth's translation of Le pays du fromage was published as A Ramshackle Home (LLP, 2023) and became a CBC Books top 40 title.

Felicia Mihali's profile page

"The star-crossed relationship concludes in Irina's mind with one of the most romantic ideas around: that declaring her love for Yannis, not holding back because of fear or timidity, would have given him a reason to survive the war." — The Globe and Mail.

"The premise of Felicia Mihali's new novel The Darling of Kandahar is taken from a real-life event. After a young woman appeared on the cover of the 2007 University Student issue of Maclean's magazine, a Canadian soldier stationed in Afghanistan, apparently taken with the photo, wrote a letter that was printed in the magazine. The media began calling the cover girl "the darling of Kandahar." Mihali fictionalizes this girl as Irina, a Montreal student who is asked to pose for the cover of Maclean's and later receives an email with the subject line "Hello from Kandahar.? -- Montreal Review of Books.

"The novel is set in Montreal, and Irina often turns her attention to the city's fraught history. A significant portion of the novel is dedicated to Irina and her best friend, Marika, re-enacting the story of Jeanne Mance and the founding of Montreal. This is done with such a startlingly acute analysis of those apostolic settlers, that one wonders if such a perspective can only be achieved by somebody who has not been taught to take pride in this history." -- The Rover