My favorite book in the last year is The Swallows of Kabul by Yasmina Khadra. It is a heart piercing book about two couples living under the Taliban in Kabul. In one chapter a husband begs his wife to go for a walk with him and she finally agrees, only to have a solider abuse her and physically force her husband to attend the mosque, leaving her to stand in the heat boiling under a burka. The helplessness of both of them to protect each other in the face of such random brutality haunts me. With all the hype over Hosseni’s A Thousand Splendid Suns this jewel was never mentioned as a companion read, but I found it at The Bookseller in Grass Valley, CA. Read the rest of this entry »
Claire
Kim
