A. G. Mojtabai made her literary debut in 1974 with "Mundome," an extraordinary, poetic novel…. This first novel was a dark, modern-gothic book, lighted by shafts of demonic wit and marked by distinction of style and bold imagination. One surmised that this strangely named writer of the work with the strange name had been there and back, had by herself descended some distance into the imprisoning abyss where her characters languished. Hers was the report of a survivor….

"A Stopping Place," is set in [Iran and Pakistan] during the early 1960's and shows prescient knowledge of the explosive mixture of Moslem religious zealotry and ethnic power politics that fueled the recent Iranian revolution and has kept Pakistan "destabilized" since the British withdrawal and the partitioning of the Indian subcontinent. The book is almost obsessively concerned with forms and occasions of imprisonment, oppression and constraint. This emphasis reflects, no doubt...