Shadow City A Woman Walks Kabul

WINNER STANFORD DOLMAN TRAVEL BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARDWINNER TATA LITERATURE LIVE! 2020 FIRST BOOK AWARD FOR NON-FICTION'A fabulous piece of writing . . . I recommend it unreservedly' - William Dalrymple'A brilliant book' - Christina LambWhen Taran N. Khan first arrives in Kabul in the spring of 2006-five years after the Taliban government was overthrown-she finds a city both familiar and unknown. Falling in with poets archaeologists and film-makers she begins to explore the city and over the course of several returns discovers a Kabul quite different from the one she had expected. Shadow City is an account of these expeditions a personal and meditative portrait of a city we know primarily in terms of conflict. With Khan as our guide we move from the glitter of wedding halls to the imperilled beauty of a Buddhist monastery slip inside a beauty salon and wander through book markets. But as these walks take us deeper into the city it becomes clear that to talk of Kabul's various wars in the past tense is a mistake. Part reportage and part reflection Shadow City is an elegiac prose map of Kabul's hidden spaces-and the cities that we carry within us. Review An intricate intimate portrait of a heartbreaking city its people and its past written with nuance love and attention. In her multidimensional memoir Taran Khan explores Kabul as she wanders-through its streets but also its literature its politics but also its passions-revealing as she does her own exacting compassionate sense of what the city was and can still be. -- Alice Albinia author of Empires of the Indus The Story of a RiverTaran Khan invites and leads us into a wonderful journey through the streets of Kabul its history and culture. Step by step with her we breathe in the city's air of mysticism and mystery walk through gardens full of myths and secrets and we caress the wounds and scars of war on the skin of the city. -- Atiq Rahimi author of Earth and AshesThrough these deep and compassionate portraits of ordinary people who call Kabul home Taran Khan tells the story of the city through war and peace as never told before. At a time when deep uncertainty hangs over Afghanistan's future once again Shadow City provides an invaluable perspective on life in its capital -- Snigdha Poonam author of Dreamers How Young Indians are Changing the WorldWalking through Kabul's winding streets... Khan conjures hidden worlds that defy our expectations of what this country can or should be ...Her lyrical prose brings to life the most daring truth a writer can offer that these tragedies were not preordained and another Afghanistan is possible. -- Anand Gopal author of No Good Men Among the Living America the Taliban and the War through Afghan EyesOn the surface Kabul is a city caught ""between the hope of peace and the habit of violence."" The deeper reality though is even more complex and layered like Kabul's actual lanes those that map its character ""twist and vanish . . . like well-kept secrets."" It is an elusive illusive place -bood nabood now you see it now you don't. Taran Khan's achievement is to have caught it in an affecting and beautifully observed portrait a word-map that will endure. -- Tim Mackintosh-Smith author of The Hall of a Thousand Columns Hindustan to Malabar with Ibn BattutahAny reader of this book is sure to discover a Kabul so unlike what the media portrays. Taran's love of the city comes across in her enchanting evocation of a city where so many tragedies echo from across Kabul's decades of war. On her last walk she writes ""to leave Kabul was to take it with you."" This is what happened when I finished reading this book I took Kabul with me. -- Raja Shehadeh author of Palestinian Walks Notes on a Vanishing LandscapeThis book is a refreshing counterpoint to the macho foreign correspondent genre typically more preoccupied with al-Qaida's generals the progress an