The Storyteller's Daughter
One Woman's Return To Her Lost Homeland
Shah, Saira
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BOOK SYNOPSIS
Imagine that a jewel-like garden overlooking Kabul is your ancestral home. Imagine a kitchen made fragrant with saffron strands and cardamom pods simmering in an authentic pilau. Now remember that you were born in London, your family in exile, and that you have never seen Afghanistan in peacetime.
These are but the starting points of Saira Shah’s memoir, by turns inevitably exotic and unavoidably heartbreaking, in which she explores her family’s history in and out of Afghanistan. As an accomplished journalist and documentarian–her film Beneath the Veil unflinchingly depicted for CNN viewers the humiliations forced on women under Taliban rule–Shah returned to her family’s homeland cloaked in the burqa to witness the pungent and shocking realities of Afghan life. As the daughter of the Sufi fabulist Idries Shah, primed by a lifetime of listening to her father’s stories, she eagerly sought out, from the mouths of Afghan refugees in Pakistan, the rich and living myths that still sustain this battered culture of warriors. And she discovered that in Afghanistan all the storytellers have been men–until now.
BOOK REVIEWS
Brilliant and moving. The New York Times Book Review
The Storytellers Daughter is the work of a confident yet modest and self-effacing woman who is drawn to danger and whose greatest desire is to understand her incompatible worlds of East and West. The Washington Post Book World
Absorbing, heartbreaking. . . . A book about myths and their double-edged power to inspire and delude. . . . Filled with memorable sounds, sights and insights. Los Angeles Times
Both tender and haunting. . . . A stylized work of humility and heartbreaking devastation and dignity. San Francisco Chronicle
Heartstopping. . . . Rich and startlingly eventful. . . . The Storytellers Daughter has the energy of a necessary catharsis. Vogue
An extraordinary book by a remarkable young woman. . . . There is not likely to be a better one about Afghanistan. Doris Lessing
Her courage takes the breath away. O: The Oprah Magazine
Saira Shah takes us on an extraordinary journey from an English childhood, laced with Afghan myths handed down from her forebears, to the terrors and complexities of present-day Afghanistan. . . . At the end of it you are left with the truest sense of this magical country together with the recognition this exceptional English writer is still unmistakably Afghani. Jon Snow
Invaluable. . . . A beautifully related journey to enlightenmment. Rocky Mountain News
A remarkable and essential book about Afghanistan. . . . It is alive with detail, emotion, myth, fable, bleeding reality, and those laughs and freedoms which arise defiantly out of the darkest of times to assert the human spirit. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, author of Imagining the New Britain
A rare, much-needed glimpse into a still-closed society. Asian Week
Deeply moving. . . . Here is a book written with resolute grace, much humour and underpinned by an unflinching spirit of enquiry. Jason Elliot, author of An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan
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MORE BOOK INFO
ISBN: 1400031478
ISBN(13-digit): 9781400031474
Copyright: 2004
Dewey Decimal: 958.104/6
Library of Congress: oc2007104929
Book Publisher: Random House Inc
Language: ENG
No. of Pages: 253
Paper Weight (lb): .4625 lb
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