Conviction

The story of a young, American woman's misguided journey to join ISIS and the grief of the mother she leaves behind--a gripping and thought-provoking exploration of loss, empathy, and hope from the acclaimed author of The Mercy Seat

Maggie is gone. And her mother, Ann, is reeling.

In the aftermath of 9/11, eleven-year-old Maggie's first instinct was rage. But when her parents took her to an open house at a mosque, she glimpsed a faith of beauty and peace--and over time came to embrace Islam as her own.

A decade later, Maggie has left Maine for the life in New York she always dreamed of. Yet her joy is shadowed by images from Syria: civilians starving, children buried under rubble. She feels powerless to help. Then she meets Ahmet, the handsome and headstrong son of a neighborhood baker. Ahmet is enraged by all the same things she is--so much that he leaves his life behind to join a new rebel group emerging in Syria, electrified by its sweeping vision to fight Assad and create a Muslim utopia. The group is ISIS.

Driven by love, Maggie follows him into territory from which she can't return. Trapped without her passport and cut off from home, she slowly gleans the brutal nature of the group she has joined, one that does not share her vision of Islam.

Back in Maine, Ann is left with silence and half-truths, with the hope that one day her daughter will realize her mistake and come home. As ISIS explodes into global infamy, Ann becomes consumed by questions of what she did not see in her daughter and how belief--whether religious, political, or maternal--can turn to conviction, and conviction to ruin.

Told in counterpoint between mother and daughter, America and Syria, Conviction is both intimate and global in scope: a portrait of love during war, and a nuanced dive into the horrors of the modern world and the conditions that beget violence.

Elizabeth Winthrop's novels include The Mercy Seat, Fireworks, December, and The Why of Things. She was the recipient of the Schaeffer Writing Fellowship at the University of California at Irvine where she earned her MFA. She lives with her husband and daughter in Massachusetts, where she is Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing at Endicott College.