Little Sara couldn't understand death on that hot day, but since then she was scattered in the coldness of desolation and rarely afterward did her heart feel any warmth. A Gate to Paradise picks up Sara's story twenty years after the death of her mother as she prepares to enter into an arranged marriage.

This memoir follows Sara and her thoughts and dreams as she is stuck in a web of complex relationships in her home of Damascus, Syria. She lives in a continuous conflict between madness, pain, and tenderness. An educated woman in the medical field, she tells her story against the...