Excerpt from Guest House for Young Widows by Azadeh Moaveni, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

A few months into her existence as a specter at school, Nour told her parents she'd had enough. "At least finish and get your certificate," her mother said. But Nour could not see how it was possible to learn anything when she felt herself reviled by the teachers. Nothing entered her head anyway, not how to graph an atom or the qualities of a hypotenuse. What was the point?

She quit school in 2009. Now, instead, she spent her mornings at home helping her mother clean and cook. After lunch she read the Quran. The neighborhood mosque had a prayer room where girls could meet to talk and discuss religion, and it was here that the imam's wife befriended her.

Nour liked the imam's wife's spirited laugh and genuine conversation, the small lessons she gave that illuminated aspects of the religion—lessons about the mindset to bring to prayer and the importance of charity, and how it would ennoble a person. She told Nour stories about the prophets, about Moses and Jesus, and most of all, stories about the Prophet Muhammad's qualities. The Prophet said: "Guard yourself from the Hellfire even with half a date in charity. If he cannot find it, then with a kind word." Nour could manage half a date, and feeling like she could help others, even when she herself had so little, was heartening. She wasn't as powerless as she thought. When the imam's wife invited other women over for a circle of discussion, Nour was often too shy to say very much herself. But she listened avidly and took it all in.

Excerpted from Guest House for Young Widows by Azadeh Moaveni. Copyright © 2019 by Azadeh Moaveni. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.