From Publishers Weekly
Northern Irish author Azadeh's first collection, five near-novella-length stories, exhibits a deliberate yet serpentine lyricism, a perfect style for her tales of world-travel and world-weariness. The stories are unlinked, yet follow a kind of ideological trajectory: characters journey from conformity to independence, from safety to identity-forging challenges. The first tale, "The Country Road," movingly conveys an eight-year-old girl's fearful sense of "inconsolable defeat" after she realizes that her overworked, exhausted mother and dying laborer father will never fulfill the dream of emigrating to America from their 1950s rural town; the closing, title story concerns an Arab woman discovering that the marriage arranged for her years ago can never make her happy. The latter narrative takes place on the C?te d'Azur, and the author describes the Mediterranean as a "saucer of blue varnish under a benign sky." Such sparkling language appears throughout, often acquiring the powerful fluidity found in "Bronagh." Here the eponymous protagonist, newly graduated from Cambridge, spends a summer in an Andalusian village, where she nearly falls in love with an idealistic farm girl named Pilar. Looking back on that time, Bronagh recalls recoiling from Pilar's touch, a fearful retraction that besmirched their friendship, and which she still regrets. The politics and history of the regional settings are impressively but not ostentatiously woven through the characters' lives. In "A Recitation of Nomads," a 30ish unmarried couple (she English, he American) travel to Morocco where their compatibility, patience and love are tested. This journey is especially gripping, as the English woman deals simultaneously with her identity as an artist and as a tourist, enduring gender-based rough treatment from Marrakech locals. Azadeh's prose is euphonious and beautifully evocative of her settings, and the organic progression of the collection spotlights the female narrators' transforming abilities to cope with autonomy and responsibility, risk and romance. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Like her short story characters, Azadeh has lived in Ireland, England, and France. In this first book, she focuses on the feelings of those traveling to alien environments, trying to blend into foreign cultures but never belonging. These semi-misfits who appear not to fit in always hope that the next place will be better than the place they call home. Eight-year-old Cathy lives in Ireland but yearns to leave; Bronagh travels far from her native Ireland but belongs nowhere; an English painter and her American writer boyfriend build a relationship on too little and travel far, trying unsuccessfully to make their elusive dreams a reality; a young Muslim wife in Antibes is trapped in a dying marriage, far away from everything she ever considered normal. In stark prose, Azadeh portrays strangers who never really belong and never achieve the happiness they feel they deserve. For larger collections.AEllen R. Cohen, Rockville, MD Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Michael Upchurch
Azadeh's debut reads, refreshingly, like a throwback to an earlier literary era. Unwilling to wrap its intelligent observations in glib packaging, the book asks to be read slowly and carefully, and then reread.


From Kirkus Reviews
Five cool, measured novellas featuring a variety of migrs at loose ends. In ``The Country Road,'' Azadeh, who was born in Belfast, plumbs the origins of flight in the tale of a young girl growing up in the rather suffocating rural precincts of Ireland in the 1950s, tracing with a nicely understated precision the manner in which a longing for anonymity and freedom emerges in her young protagonist. ``Bronagh'' charts the alarming impact on a young Irishwoman, abroad for the first time, of the seductive power of the Mediterranean and the unsettling possibilities of physical desire that she comes to associate with it. ``A Banal Stain'' deftly uses the history of an old house in Lyon, where a foreign graduate student settles, as a study of the ways in which outsiders discover, and often misperceive, the complexities of the past. ``A Recitation of Nomads,'' about the impact of Morocco on the relationship of an English painter and her American lover, is inevitably reminiscent of the fiction of Paul Bowles, but nonetheless manages to seem persuasive in its own right. The title story, about the foundering marriage of a young woman from the Middle East and her scientist husband, played out against the dazzling background of Antibes, is a subtle and exact meditation on the complicated ways in which we pursue or abandon our dreams. Like the work of Elizabeth Bowen and William Trevor, Azadeh's fiction matches a precise, rather stately prose (at times perhaps too statelyseveral of the tales could have benefitted from a swifter pace) with sharply observant depictions of character. A thoughtful, convincing, and impressive debut. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
Home and exile, memory and yearning, childhood and aging - he themes are timeless, but the moments captured in these exquisitely told lyrical stories of women alone and abroad lie on the edge of the century now ending. In "The Country Road," eight-year-old Cathy moves at a heartbreaking pace through lonely days in a Northern Ireland populated by elderly neighbors and menaced indeterminately by security forces, while the eponymous heroine of "Bronagh" finds herself wrenched from an idyllic sojourn in Andalucia and thrust into a painful homeward trek when her mother falls ill. In "A Banal Stain," a graduate student lodging in a once-grand house in Lyon confronts the ghosts of France's colonial and Vichy past, and in Morocco the twenty-something English painter and her American writer boyfriend of "A Recitation of Nomads" strive to mend their dreams. "The Marriage at Antibes" is an arranged one, of a Middle Eastern political refugee, long settled in France, and his newly arrived bride. At the core of these scrupulously observed, brilliantly realized stories of foreign travel and exotic cultures stand the pull and the power of vital human relationships - between men and women, fathers and daughters, landlords and tenants, husbands and wives.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Home and exile, memory and yearning, childhood and aging--the themes are timeless, but the moments captured in these exquisitely told fictions of women alone and abroad lie at the edge of the century now ending.

FROM THE CRITICS

Merle Rubin - Wall Street Journal

In The Marriage at Antibes, Carol Azadeth's stories are gracefully written, with a wealth of observation and detail.

Publishers Weekly

Northern Irish author Azadeh's first collection, five near-novella-length stories, exhibits a deliberate yet serpentine lyricism, a perfect style for her tales of world-travel and world-weariness. The stories are unlinked, yet follow a kind of ideological trajectory: characters journey from conformity to independence, from safety to identity-forging challenges. The first tale, "The Country Road," movingly conveys an eight-year-old girl's fearful sense of "inconsolable defeat" after she realizes that her overworked, exhausted mother and dying laborer father will never fulfill the dream of emigrating to America from their 1950s rural town; the closing, title story concerns an Arab woman discovering that the marriage arranged for her years ago can never make her happy. The latter narrative takes place on the C te d'Azur, and the author describes the Mediterranean as a "saucer of blue varnish under a benign sky." Such sparkling language appears throughout, often acquiring the powerful fluidity found in "Bronagh." Here the eponymous protagonist, newly graduated from Cambridge, spends a summer in an Andalusian village, where she nearly falls in love with an idealistic farm girl named Pilar. Looking back on that time, Bronagh recalls recoiling from Pilar's touch, a fearful retraction that besmirched their friendship, and which she still regrets. The politics and history of the regional settings are impressively but not ostentatiously woven through the characters' lives. In "A Recitation of Nomads," a 30ish unmarried couple (she English, he American) travel to Morocco where their compatibility, patience and love are tested. This journey is especially gripping, as the English woman deals simultaneously with her identity as an artist and as a tourist, enduring gender-based rough treatment from Marrakech locals. Azadeh's prose is euphonious and beautifully evocative of her settings, and the organic progression of the collection spotlights the female narrators' transforming abilities to cope with autonomy and responsibility, risk and romance. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Like her short story characters, Azadeh has lived in Ireland, England, and France. In this first book, she focuses on the feelings of those traveling to alien environments, trying to blend into foreign cultures but never belonging. These semi-misfits who appear not to fit in always hope that the next place will be better than the place they call home. Eight-year-old Cathy lives in Ireland but yearns to leave; Bronagh travels far from her native Ireland but belongs nowhere; an English painter and her American writer boyfriend build a relationship on too little and travel far, trying unsuccessfully to make their elusive dreams a reality; a young Muslim wife in Antibes is trapped in a dying marriage, far away from everything she ever considered normal. In stark prose, Azadeh portrays strangers who never really belong and never achieve the happiness they feel they deserve. For larger collections.--Ellen R. Cohen, Rockville, MD Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Michael Upchurch - The New York Times Book Review

Azadeh's debut reads, refreshingly, like a throwback to an earlier literary era. Unwilling to wrap its intelligent observations in glib packaging, the book asks to be read slowly and carefully, and then reread.

Kirkus Reviews

Five cool, measured novellas featuring a variety of émigrés at loose ends. In "The Country Road," Azadeh, who was born in Belfast, plumbs the origins of flight in the tale of a young girl growing up in the rather suffocating rural precincts of Ireland in the 1950s, tracing with a nicely understated precision the manner in which a longing for anonymity and freedom emerges in her young protagonist. "Bronagh" charts the alarming impact on a young Irishwoman, abroad for the first time, of the seductive power of the Mediterranean and the unsettling possibilities of physical desire that she comes to associate with it. "A Banal Stain" deftly uses the history of an old house in Lyon, where a foreign graduate student settles, as a study of the ways in which outsiders discover, and often misperceive, the complexities of the past. "A Recitation of Nomads," about the impact of Morocco on the relationship of an English painter and her American lover, is inevitably reminiscent of the fiction of Paul Bowles, but nonetheless manages to seem persuasive in its own right. The title story, about the foundering marriage of a young woman from the Middle East and her scientist husband, played out against the dazzling background of Antibes, is a subtle and exact meditation on the complicated ways in which we pursue or abandon our dreams. Like the work of Elizabeth Bowen and William Trevor, Azadeh's fiction matches a precise, rather stately prose (at times perhaps too stately—several of the tales could have benefitted from a swifter pace) with sharply observant depictions of character. A thoughtful, convincing, and impressive debut.