Rebellious eighteen-year-old Anya expected consequences when her strict Pakistani-Muslim parents uncovered her secret relationship with her boyfriend. But she didn’t expect them to remove her from her hometown of London and away from her best friend, Kamila – or for them to ship her off to Lahore, in Pakistan, arranging her marriage to a man fifteen years her elder.
Imran is everything Anya is not: callous, calculating, cruel. However, Anya knows her own parents found love and built a family after their arranged marriage, so with gumption, she throws herself into her new home with Imran’s family. But as Anya grows up in a place she struggles to call home, she realises that marriage comes with sacrifice: saying goodbye to the chance to pursue her talent for fashion design, watching friends build fulfilling lives of their own, and learning to accept that her husband is obsessed with his brother’s wife.
As Imran’s abusive behaviour becomes increasingly apparent, Anya soon finds herself trapped in a marriage that pushes her to her greatest limits. Over the subsequent decade, a once-naïve girl becomes a fierce mother-of-three. And while Anya endures more than she could ever imagine, enough is enough. Powered by love, heartache, and commendable hope, she must do whatever it takes to escape—or risk her children suffering a similar fate.
