In the spirit of Amy Tan’s international bestselling novel The Joy Luck Club, Mirrors and Mirages is an intricately woven, deftly told story that follows the lives of women and their daughters.

In Mirrors and Mirages, Monia Mazigh lets us into the lives of six women. They are immigrant mothers — Emma, Samia, and Fauzia — guardians of tradition who want their daughters to enjoy freedom in Western society. They are daughters — Lama, Sally, and Louise, a young woman who converted to Islam for love — university students who are clever and computer savvy. They decide for themselves whether or not to wear a veil, or niqab. Gradually, these women cross paths, and, without losing their authenticity, they become friends and rivals, mirrors and mirages of each other.

Monia Mazigh was born and raised in Tunisia and immigrated to Canada in 1991. Mazigh was catapulted onto the public stage in 2002 when her husband, Maher Arar, was deported to Syria where he was tortured and held without charge. She campaigned tirelessly for his release. Mazigh holds a Ph.D. in finance from McGill University. She has published a memoir, Hope and Despair, and her novel Miroirs et mirages was published in the original French in 2011 and was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award.

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A three-time winner of the Governor General's Award for translation, and shortlisted for his 2009 translation of Thierry Hentsch's Le temps aboli (Empire of Desire), Fred A. Reed has translated works by many of Quebec's leading authors, several in collaboration with novelist David Homel, as well as works by Nikos Kazantzakis and other modern Greek writers. His most recent work, with David Homel, includes Philippe Arsenault's Zora and Martine Desjardins' The Green Chamber. Baraka Books will publish his translation, from Modern Greek, of Yannis Tsirbas' Vic City Express in September. His latest book is Then We Were One: Fragments of Two Lives, an autobiographical essay, published in French by Fides Éditeur.

Fred Reed's profile page