
Paradise at H/er Feet chronicles the harrowing abduction of Azra Kiani, a neurochemist whose breakthrough at a New York university unveils a micronutrient treatment for depressive disorders that could cost Big Pharma 15 billion a year. Fearing for their safety, her colleague Latif Gupta flees to Montréal with Azra's son, Yusuf, whom Azra adopted from a fundamentalist madrassa. Together they attempt to unravel the web of deception between corporate corruption and insidious politics that led to Azra's disappearance. The heart-wrenching story propelled by fear shuttles back and forth between Azra's attempts to identify the source of her abduction and locate Yusuf, and the painstaking process Yusuf undergoes as he sheds his fundamentalist ideals and navigates the minefield of her transgender identity.
Melanie Mitzner is an award-winning writer currently living in Montreal, Quebec. Her novel, Slow Reveal, was a finalist in the Heekin Group Foundation James Fellowship, and an excerpt of her novel Too Good to Be True was published in the Harrington Quarterly (2006). She was awarded an Edward Albee Fellowship for her play Personal Effects. Her screenplay Dodge and Burn was a finalist in the Writers Guild East Foundation Fellowships, and In the Name of Love and Out to Lunch were finalists in the Houston Film Festival Screenwriting Competition. A former journalist in tech/broadcasting and co-founder of The Groovy Mind, she's now concentrating on political, social and environmental justice while toiling away on her controversial new novel The Ex-Pat.