A young woman poses for the cover of a magazine. A Canadian soldier serving in Kandahar falls in love with her photograph and sends her an email. The Darling of Kandahar tells an astonishing story of love, loss, and displacement against the background of the war in Afghanistan, of the founding of the city of Montreal – and of a city now crowded with immigrants. When Felicia Mihali's first novel appeared in French in 2002, it was compared to Marie-Claire Blais's masterpiece, A Season in the Life of Emmanuel. Making her English-language début with The Darling of Kandahar, Mihali now joins Nancy Huston as one of the few writers working in English as well as French.

Adam is happily married when he has a stroke at the age of fifty, and his behaviour changes to that of a ten-year-old. What are his secrets? Are there any he should be sharing? His wife would like to know. A Second Chance reveals its secrets slowly. We can see how changed Adam is, but we also sense that we don't know the whole story. The wife is loving, but there is a puzzling edge to her account of her days with Adam. It's only as we come to the devastating conclusion that we learn what happened before Adam suffered his stroke. A novel about devotion and betrayal, A Second Chance is also about forgiveness.