A finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, HALF A CUP OF SAND AND SKY is a moving portrait of one woman’s search for love and belonging cast against a nuanced backdrop of political turmoil.

It is 1977, and the anti-shah protests at Tehran University are intensifying, but Amineh is not like her peers who want a say in the future of their country. Her thoughts are on the beautiful literature of another era and her past of rose harvests and Rumi poetry evenings under the desert sky. A chance encounter with Farzad, an opposition leader and disarmament activist, will thrust her into a life she didn’t ask for and didn’t want. Nobody wanted the tyranny that is quickly turning worse than the tyranny it replaced. But maybe Amineh has been looking at her life all wrong. Maybe the thing she is seeking is not in the past at all.