Maryam Rostampour and Marziyeh Amirizadeh knew they were putting their lives on the line. Though Islamic laws in Iran forbade them from sharing their Christian beliefs, in three years they’d covertly put New Testaments into the hands of twenty thousand of their countrymen. They’d started two secret house churches, including one for prostitutes—many of them women who had been abandoned by their husbands and had no other way to support themselves and their children. Maryam and Marziyeh had almost been caught many times…it seemed like divine intervention when they were not.

But finally—perhaps inevitably—in 2009, the two young women were arrested and held in the notorious Evin Prison in Tehran, a place where inmates are routinely tortured, and executions are swift and sudden. But in the face of chilling interrogations and intimidation, and despite a death sentence, something remarkable happened: Instead of succumbing to fear, they chose to take the radical—and dangerous—step of sharing their faith inside the very walls of the government stronghold that was meant to silence them.

In Captive in Iran, Maryam and Marziyeh recount how God used their 259 days in Evin Prison to bring about a miraculous reversal: shining light into one of the world’s darkest places, giving hope to those who had lost everything, and showing love to those in despair.