Excerpt from The Gardens of Consolation by Parisa Reza, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

And now pillagers, bandits, and Mashallah Khan Kashi's gang appeared out of nowhere taking everything in their path. People fled into the mountains and came home to find only desolation.

The evil eye. Ghamsar was too beautiful for the jealous desert people to leave it in peace. Sardar could feel it: If he stayed here he would perish. He did not know when or how, but he felt quite sure of it.

Once the sale of his land was concluded, Sardar approached his uncle on a supremely important point: He asked him for Talla's hand. The girl with the green eyes from the upper end of the village, the girl for whom his heart beat. He wanted Ghamsari blood to flow in his children's veins, and told his uncle so. Sardar had often watched his chosen one: She would make a good wife, for she was hardworking. She came and went with conviction and no childish dallying. And 2 2 - P A R I S A R E Z A beautiful, too, with her emerald eyes, tall and slender, a very pink little mouth, and two braids falling down to her waist from beneath her scarf. He did not intend to take her with him, but meant to leave her in Ghamsar while he found himself a position in Tehran, and then he would come for her. He did not know Tehran, nor the road there; it would be wiser not to involve Talla in this hazardous adventure straightaway. But his heart was instructing him to marry her before traveling so far afield. He knew he needed to be married to Talla in order to accomplish great things, he needed her to be waiting for him.

As a general rule, the people from the upper village and the lower village in Ghamsar lived in peace alongside each other; nevertheless, they did not mix, choosing to keep their distance. Depending on which part of the village they came from, people's lives were not altogether the same, and neither were their dreams. The lower village was on the way out of Ghamsar, and its inhabitants were more outward-looking, more influenced by the outside world. Had Sardar lived in the upper village, he might not have had such a strong desire to leave. But the route to the wider world was on this side, it called to people, lured them; some took it and others did not, but all inevitably contemplated it.

Talla's father thought this young man from the lower village who had the courage to travel far was honoring his family. That is what he said. Truth be told, what struck him most was that Sardar was a nephew of the new head of the clan in the lower village. Good alliances should never be turned down, and daughters were a way of sealing them. That was their primary value. Beyond that, whether they stayed or left mattered little.

Out of respect for customary propriety, Talla's father took some time to reflect and to discuss the matter with the mullah, then he granted Sardar Talla's hand. Having agreed they could be married, he said the marriage should not be celebrated or consummated until Sardar's return. If Sardar met with misfortune, if he did not return, Talla's father wanted to have no trouble in finding another husband for his daughter. Her innocence must be preserved.

And so, at the age of nine, Talla was married, and proud to be so. She liked the look of her husband, he was a tall young man with wide shoulders and a fine bearing. He had a luminous face and was a good man, she knew it.

The couple did not speak to each other until the day Sardar left. In the meantime the groom first visited Talla's house with his uncle to ask for her hand, and then they returned to hear her father's reply. On the day they were married, they both sat on the ground, Talla on one side of her father and Sardar on the other, heads lowered, eyes downcast. The mullah recited the marriage ceremony and asked for their consent. They said "yes" and the mullah pronounced them man and wife.

The day Sardar left, Talla's family came down from the upper village and joined all of the lower village as they gathered around him to pray and say their farewells. Talla was allowed to stand at the front. When the time came for him to begin his journey, Sardar spoke to his wife for the first time with a simple goodbye.

Excerpted from The Gardens of Consolation by Parisa Reza. Copyright © 2016 by Parisa Reza. Excerpted by permission of Europa Editions. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.