A forbidden love. A world closing in. A choice that could cost everything.
In the small town of Gul Dara, Amina Rahimi has built her life around discipline, study, and the dream of becoming a doctor. Laleh Safi has learned to expect less. Her days begin before dawn in her family's bakery, and every year brings new reasons to make herself smaller.
When Amina is asked to tutor Laleh beneath a mulberry tree by the canal, friendship deepens into something neither girl can safely name. Then the world around them begins to close. School gates are shut. Papers are burned. Rumors become rules. And as fear moves into every home, marriage pressure begins to gather around Laleh like a tightening wall.
Now Amina and Laleh must decide what love means in a life ruled by obedience, family duty, and danger. Is it something to hide? Something to deny? Or something worth risking everything to protect?
Tender, lyrical, and emotionally powerful, Under the Mulberry Tree is a novel of first love, silence, and survival about the lives girls build in secret, and the courage it takes to choose a future no one meant to leave open.