Book description
Kabul, 1979. A student wakes in an unfamiliar house, battered and
bruised. He gradually recovers his mind to discover that returning
from a night out he was brutally attacked by soldiers and left to die.
Farhad, the tragic hero of this nightmarish tale, realises that he
can now never return home: to do so would be to risk the lives of his
family. As he waits for an answer to his plight he learns the tragic
story of the woman who has saved him, endangering her own life in the
process, and begins to feel an impossible and forbidden love for her -
a love that embodies an angry compassion for the suffering of
Afghanistan's women, and the yearning for a lost home.
Born in Afghanistan in 1962, Atiq Rahimi fled to France in 1984.
There he has made a name as a writer, film and documentary maker of
exceptional note. The film of his first novel,
Earth and Ashes,
was in the Official Selection at Cannes, 2004. He has written two
novels,
A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear
and
The Patience Stone
. Since 2001, he has returned to Afghanistan many times to set up a
Writers' House in Kabul and offer support and training to young writers
and film-makers. He lives in Paris.
