I liked this novel a lot; this passage, from a broken-hearted young woman who’s had just about the worst year imaginable, is perfect:

…A little girl with four women wondering after her, looking for her, sort of, without her ever knowing. That was love of the most useless kind, unless you believed in love’s power to waft in from a burning sky to the unseen grass it had designated as its beloved, unless you believed in the prayers of faraway nuns, unless you believed in miracles and magic, rapture and dice and Sufic chants and charms behind curtains and smoky, unfathomable distances.