These are quirky and addictive stories. The characters in True Romance with a Sailor encounter their spiritual selves through cross-cultural displacement, whether by travel to another country or continent or because of an encounter with a foreigner whose cultural and psychic make-up is totally alien. For Yeshim Ternar, all such encounters are about contacting one's shadow self. Whenever the everyday self encounters its shadow self, the heart beats a crazy rhythm of love and fear, longing and abandonment. Ternar wrote these stories hoping to create fiction that is to mainstream literature what world beat music is to soft rock.

Turkish-born Yeshim Ternar is the author of the short story collections Orphaned by Halley`s Comet and True Romance with a Sailor (which was shortlisted for Mordecai Richler`s 1996 Prix Parizeau, and the 1996 QSPELL Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction). The Book & the Veil: Escape from an Istanbul Harem, a blending of essay and fiction, was described by Charles Foran in the Montreal Gazette as "daring in form and bold in intent."

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