FIRST PLACE FICTION WINNER of the 2015 Next Generation Indie Book Awards It is the spring of 1989 and Erika, a disenfranchised fifteen-year-old American girl, is traveling cross-country to elope with her thirty-two-year-old Iranian lover. The only daughter of two immigrant academics, socially inept but bright and precocious, Erika is lured away from home by Majij Aziz, a troubled and deeply flawed physician whose understanding of love is scarred by a lifetime of abuse and a masochistic adherence to a fundamentalist religion. In the ten months that they travel from Oregon across Montana,...