From the New York Times: "Nahid Rachlin, an Iranian-born writer who defied her parents’ expectations of an arranged marriage, instead winning a scholarship to study in the United States in the 1950s and becoming one of the first Iranians to write a novel in English, died on April 30 in Manhattan. She was 85.

Her daughter, Leila Rachlin, said the cause of her death, in a hospital, was a stroke.

Ms. Rachlin’s debut novel, “Foreigner,” published to critical acclaim the year before the Iranian revolution of 1979, depicts the slow transformation of a 32-year-old Iranian biologist named Feri from a woman living a comfortable but unsatisfying suburban life with her American husband to an ill-at-ease visitor in Iran to an indistinguishable local after she abandons her job and her spouse and resigns herself to wearing the veil...." 

NYT article.