— Finalist for the 2011 Oregon Book Award! —

With an ethnographer's trained eye and a poet's lyric tongue, Lisa Ohlen Harris travels to the Middle East where she finds, in a mosque, "tile after tile, the design of every square repeating the one next to it in a silent echo, lonely and lovely." Loneliness and loveliness pervade Harris's story as we journey with her to seek out answers in a land embraced by questions.

— Brenda Miller, author of Season of the Body and Blessing of the Animals


Captivating. "Through" is the operative word in Through the Veil as Lisa Ohlen Harris — with curiosity and compassion — chronicles her unique contact with women of the Middle East. Beautifully orchestrated with honesty, insight, and humor, this book penetrates another culture and, at the same time, helps us understand what it is to be American, in the best sense of that word.

— Judith Kitchen, author of Distance and Direction