In 2007, a Canadian soldier stationed in Kandahar sent a letter to Maclean's magazine thanking the editors for the cover of their annual University Student Edition, which featured a young Canadian woman of Romanian descent who had become the new pin-up girl for the soldier and his comrades. Headlines flashed "The Darling of Kandahar," inspiring Romanian-Canadian writer Felicia Mihali’s first novel in English.

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

• Long-listed, Canada Reads Nomination