Dimensions
155 x 234 x 26mm
An evocative family memoir and portrait of a changing Afghanistan - in the story of one family's past is the search for the nation's future.
Hamida Ghafour's family fled Kabul after the Russian invasion. In 2003 she was sent back as a journalist to cover the country's reconstruction. She found a place utterly changed from the world her parents had brought her up to believe in. Changed, even, from the world of her grandmother - an Afghan Virginia Woolf, in the 1930s she wrote poetry about women's freedom and urged the Muslim world to embrace modernity. In the story of Hamida's family's past is the search for the nation's future.
All around her is the West's first post-9/11 experiment with an Islamic democracy. But the people she meets reveal a different kind of nation building: the 'beautician without border' whose school teaches women a new kind of independence; her cousin's determined parliamentary campaign; the archaeologist digging for his country's lost civilization in the form of a giant sleeping Buddha.
Hamida discovers a nation of hope and resignation, continuously hungry for change but trapped in a continuum of historic chaos, a once great civilization stepping back from the brink of almost having reduced itself to rubble. Only when she is standing by her grandmother's grave - after a heavily escorted trip in a Chinook to the wildest corner of the land - does she begin to find her own place in it all.
