All the Parts We Exile

Quotes

WINNER OF THE DAYNE OGILVIE PRIZE FOR LGBTQ2S+ EMERGING WRITERS • SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 TORONTO BOOK AWARD • FINALIST FOR THE JUDY GRAHN AWARD FOR LESBIAN NONFICTION

“All the Parts We Exile appeals to the universal with this moving tribute to authenticity, resilience, and self-acceptance. With language full of wit and tenderness, this memoir reimagines familiar immigrant and coming out narratives to ask what parts of us need connection and healing. Nozari’s powerful and fearless debut is a real testimony to the beauty of belonging that will resonate across identities and generations.” —2025 Dayne Ogilvie Prize Jury (Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay, Darrin Hagen, and Janika Oza)

“Warm, moving, and poignant . . . Roza’s voice is both raw and tender, compelling and confessional—you can’t help but love her, and cheer her on to overcome and reconcile her challenges and obstacles, to ultimately find herself, her art and her place in the world.” —2025 Toronto Book Award citation

“In this luminous work, Roza Nozari bridges the void between what’s been lost and what endures. Her story doesn’t seek to erase the fractures but to honor them, showing how, even in a life of displacement, pieces of ‘home’ can be found in the quietest, most unexpected corners. All the Parts We Exile reminds us how trauma shapes us, not by breaking us, but by etching traces of where we’ve been, making us whole again, piece by piece.” —Samra Habib, author of We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir

“Thought-provoking and meditative, All the Parts We Exile brings the plight of strong willed daughters, immigrant parents and their personal histories into clear empathetic light. Nozari’s prose is nuanced and wrought with imagery, vivid and eloquent all at once. The memoir is symphonic in scope: orchestrating excruciating rites of familial identity, radical self-acceptance, loss, and personal growth. A talented writer and artist, Nozari deftly charts a moving history that is both complex and mesmerizing, sweeping across timelines and through the queer spaces of Toronto and Iran. A dazzling opus of what it means to be a person grasping for answers of belonging and emerging transformed. Nozari’s journey invites readers to rethink the immigrant family narrative.” —Lindsay Wong, author of The Woo-Woo and Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality

“With sparkling prose and captivating storytelling, All the Parts We Exile gifts insight into a life both relatable and unique. Roza Nozari does not equivocate, evade or apologize. Here is a story that is hard, soft, witty and touching.” —Jenny Heijun Wills, author of Everything and Nothing At All

“All the Parts We Exile wraps an immigrant, coming of age, and coming out story around each other, probing the question: how do we exist and fully belong across identities? A fearless exploration of the visceral longing for home, a reckoning with trauma, grief, and displacement, and an ode to the healing power of artmaking, this is an exquisitely written, honest, tender and enthralling memoir.” —Carmen Aguirre, author of Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter

“In this compelling memoir, Roza Nozari pieces together her mother’s past while grappling with her own queerness. All the Parts We Exile is a portrait of a family of women trying their best with what they have, sorting through the detritus of migration and shame to find the parts of themselves they lost along the way.” —Catherine Hernandez, author and screenwriter of Scarborough

“An overall intensely emotional, personal excavation of the self, All the Parts We Exile is interspersed with emotive black-and-white self-portraits (by Nozari, naturally) and occasional moments of relief—usually evoked by descriptions of Persian food-related experiences and traditions. Easy to read, but by no means an easy read, written by a voice that has fought hard to come forth and demand our attention.” —Scout Magazine

Awards

• Dayne Ogilvie Prize (The Writers' Trust of Canada)
• Toronto Book Award