Seventeen-year-old Rukhsana Ali is looking forward to going to Caltech and getting away from her conservative Muslim parents' expectation that she will marry, especially since she is in love with her girlfriend Ariana--but when her parents catch her kissing Ariana, they whisk Rukhsana off to Bangladesh and a world of tradition and arranged marriages, and she must find the courage to fight for the right to choose her own path.

The universally respected NPR journalist and bestselling memoirist Scott Simon makes a dazzling fiction debut. In Pretty Birds, Simon creates an intense, startling, and tragicomic portrait of a classic character–a young woman in the besieged city of Sarajevo in the early 1990s.
In the spring of 1992, Irena Zaric is a star on her Sarajevo high school basketball team, a tough, funny teenager who has taught her parrot, Pretty Bird, to...

"Sabiha ßimen spent three years photographing Girl Quran Schools in five cities in Turkey, a subject that she knows well since she attended the same schools when she was a teenager with her twin sister. After becoming a photographer, she returned to those schools to work on her project that has now become the subject for her first book. The title Hafiz refers to one who has memorized all 604 pages of the Holy Quran. Historically the task of memorization...