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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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English
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GUEST HOUSE FOR YOUNG WIDOWS

Azadeh Moaveni

Among the Women of Isis

An intimate, riveting, account of the women who made an unthinkable decision: to leave behind their modern lives and move a world away to the backwards violence of the Islamic State.
At the heart of this story is a cast of unforgettable young women who responded. Emma, from Germany; Sharmeena from Bethnal Green, London; Nour from Tunis: these were women--some still in high school--from urban families, some with university degrees and bookshelves filled with novels by Jane Austen and Dan Brown; many with cosmopolitan dreams of travel and adventure. But instead of finding a land of justice and piety, they found themselves trapped within the most brutal terrorist regime of the twenty-first century, a world of chaos and upheaval and violence.

What is the line between victim and collaborator? How do we judge these women who both suffered and inflicted intense pain? What role is there for Muslim women in the West? In what is bound to be a modern classic of narrative nonfiction, Moaveni takes us into the school hallways of London, kitchen tables in Germany, the coffee shops in Tunis, the caliphate's OB/GYN and its "Guest House for Young Widows"--where wives of the fallen waited to be remarried--to demonstrate that the problem called terrorism is a far more complex, political, and deeply relatable one than we generally admit.

Azadeh Moaveni is a journalist, writer, and academic who has been covering the Middle East for nearly two decades. She started reporting in Cairo in 1998, while on a Fulbright fellowship to the American University in Cairo. For the next several years she reported from throughout the region as Middle East correspondent for Time magazine, based in Tehran, but covering Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, and Iraq. In November 2015, she published a front-page piece in the New York Times on ISIS women defectors that was finalist for a Pulitzer as part of the Times' ISIS coverage and that was one of the most-read investigative features of the years. She is currently a lecturer at NYU in London, and a Future of War Fellow at the New America Foundation.
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Published 2019-09-10 by Random House

Book

Published 2019-09-10 by Random House

Comments

UK/Commonwealth: Scribe ; Portuguese (Brazil): Alta Books ; Hungarian: IPC Konyvek

A journalist tries to understand the girls who left the West to join Islamic State Read more...

The debate badly needs an injection of sanity. Happily, Azadeh Moaveni's Guest House for Young Widows... provides some perspective... Moaveni makes several pertinent points. Read more...

A skilful, sensitive report on the women who left their homes to join Islamic State and found misery Read more...

News in from Scribe, the UK publishers is that they have finalized a first serial with the Observer Magazine. It will run over 4 pages, with photos (and also be online) and will include an excerpt of 500 words alongside a first-person piece by the Azadeh Moaveni of about 1,800 words about her experience tracking down the women and interviewing them and her emotional reactions to their stories and situations.

Interview on BBC Radio 4 'World at One' (22.11.19) (8 minutes in) Read more...

GUEST HOUSE FOR YOUNG WIDOWS has been selected among the 10 Best Books of the Year by Publisher's Weekly!

Moaveni has done her research (she spent decades as a reporter across the region) and the stories feel accurate... Most of these Isis brides still languish in camps across the Middle East, waiting for their home countries to decide their fates. For those interested in understanding them, this book is essential reading. Read more...

Guest House is a painstaking piece of investigative reporting that should be compulsory reading for Western politicians.

Young adults will appreciate Moaveni's analysis of the factors that contributed to the teenage women's recruitment to the radicalized group.

Moaveni humanises her subjects 13 women who joined IS from Europe and the Middle East through skillful storytelling and novelistic intimacy. Read more...

Interview and review in The Herald (12.10.19): 'Forensic yet empathetic . Always nuanced, Azadeh tears up the caricature of pyschopaths unfazed by beheadings, and paints a more comprehensible portrait of culturally dislocated girls won over by recruiters who knew exactly which buttons to press.' Read more...

GUEST HOUSE FOR YOUNG WIDOWS was declared a Book of the Year by The Observer: "...the year's most intriguing take on female agency is Azadeh Moaveni's beautifully written Guest House for Young Widows (Scribe). It's a fascinating, clear-eyed examination of what really drove a handful of women, including a small group of British schoolgirls, to move to Syria and join the jihad. She takes the kneejerk assumptions that they were either naive teenagers or sociopaths undeserving of sympathy and dismantles them to reveal a far more complex, disturbing story." Read more...

GUEST HOUSE FOR YOUNG WIDOWS was declared a Book of the Year by The Guardian: "... brilliantly illuminates the transnational lives and choices of women who joined Isis. Resting on interviews across Europe and the Middle East, it subtly, carefully explains how such women took the path they did." Read more...

Moaveni is completely in control of her material in this hugely complex subject.

GUEST HOUSE FOR YOUNG WIDOWS was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize (sadly she did not win the prize) 'What an extraordinary subject and what an extraordinary writer. This book will stun people... It takes you somewhere you've never been before... She writes wonderfully clearly and reveals these lives and these stories in all their complexities... An incredibly important book.' Frances Wilson, Baillie Gifford Prize judge Read more...

In concise, visceral vignettes, Moaveni immerses her readers in a milieu saturated with the romantic appeal of violence. The result is a journalistic tour de force that lays bare the inner lives, motivations, and aspirations of her subjects.

GUEST HOUSE FOR YOUNG WIDOWS was announced as one of the New York Times' Notable 100.