The Storyteller's Daughter: One Woman's Return to Her Lost Homeland

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.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 10/12/2004
ISBN: 9781400031474
Pages: 272
Weight: 0.50lbs
Size: 8.00h x 5.20w x 0.60d

Review Citations: Kliatt 01/01/2005 pg. 31
New York Times 01/30/2005 pg. 24
Library Journal 09/15/2007 pg. 101