Mahmoud’s passion for his wife Fereiba, a schoolteacher, is greater than any love she’s ever known. But their happy, middle-class world—a life of education, work, and comfort—implodes when their country is engulfed in war, and the Taliban rises to power.Mahmoud, a civil engineer, becomes a target of the new fundamentalist regime and is murdered. Forced to flee Kabul with her three children, … children, Fereiba has one hope to survive: she must find a way to cross Europe and reach her sister’s family in England. With forged papers and help from kind strangers they meet along the way, Fereiba make a dangerous crossing into Iran under cover of darkness. Exhausted and brokenhearted but undefeated, Fereiba manages to smuggle them as far as Greece. But in a busy market square, their fate takes a frightening turn when her teenage son, Saleem, becomes separated from the rest of the family.
Faced with an impossible choice, Fereiba pushes on with her daughter and baby, while Saleem falls into the shadowy underground network of undocumented Afghans who haunt the streets of Europe’s capitals. Across the continent Fereiba and Saleem struggle to reunite, and ultimately find a place where they can begin to reconstruct their lives.
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I really enjoy this authors writing style, and her stories of Afghanistan and its people.
This story begins with a peaceful Afghanistan and a look at how Fereiba, (below) was raised and the dynamics of her family and traditions. We follow the story to where her family has to flee from Kabul, after the Taliban appeared and forced their Sharia law and radical interpretation of Islamic beliefs on the people.
After the death of Mahmoud, Fereiba’s husband a civil engineer who becomes a target of the new fundamentalist regime is murdered, we then follow Fereiba and her three children as they make their way through Iran,Turkey, Greece, Italy and France on their journey to reach England where she has relatives. This Journey is full of hardships, and is heart wrenching at times, but along the way they encounter a lot of good and interesting people willing to lend them a hand. It is also about the eldest son Saleem, still young but who has to grow up too fast, and become a head of the family. . this story takes us on quite a ride, and makes you think of the lives of the many refugees in the news today..
I literally fell in love with SALEEM ( main character ) being a teenager i felt so weak and powerless however , Nadia Hashimi changed my perception, her novel is about never losing hope because there is always a way out, This author writes in an exceptionally effective way that will make you feel like you are the character. I read the book for two reasons : firstly because of SALEEM and secondly because my eyes refused to read anything else. READ THIS BOOK !!!!!
This book continues from The Pearl that broke it’s shell. Feriba must find her way. Her mother died and her father remarried. This book is about her life growing up with her stepmother and step siblings and eventual marriage and moving away from the Taliban and Afghanistan. I really enjoyed this book.
Amazing story, helps highlight the difficulties of refugees
Helped me to look at the lives of immigrants and refugees differently.
It is difficult to imagine the terror of being a refugee in today’s world-the impossible choices people are forced to make. This book helps make the refugee’s plight more immediate-keeps you from ignoring it. Makes you hope they will survive as a family.
Culturally informative and very humanly moving. Couldn’t stop reading and when it needed I still wanted to know more about their lives
Beautifully written.
Wonderful book…poignant and thought provoking.
I would have liked the ending to have been expanded. Otherwise I found the book to be inspirational.
It was great to have a first hand account of immigrants and their harrowing travels. Maybe more people need to read this type of book to empathize with their situation.
This is a wonderful book that depicts all too realistically the plight of Afghani immigrants fleeing impossible conditions. It is very gripping. I couldn’t put it down!
This is a wonderful book, the first one I read from Nadia Hashemi. I’ve now read a second onE of her books, and both books are authentic in covering issues of international concern. Characters are realisti and the situations believable. The story just draw me forward as i wanted to know more about this refugee family, their travailses and triumphs and in this book.
It’s a beautifully written story with gems of prose peppered here and there throughout the book that really speaks of the author’s creativity in making you see and feel what the characters are going though.
The first third of the story is about Fereiba growing up in Kabul pre-1979. I was surprised to see that life in Kabul seemed to resemble in many ways growing up anywhere in Canada in that era (…I’d dressed more like a girl—jeans, calf-length skits, and collared T-shirts). Unfortunately, everything changed in 1979 when the Soviets invaded and then it got even worse when the Taliban slowly took over in 1989. By the late 1990s, Fereiba was a widow with 3 children and against all odds decided that the only way to offer her children a chance at a better life, she had to leave not just her hometown, but her country.
It’s a harrowing journey that kept me turning the pages and filled me with so many different emotions.
This is not a fast-moving story so reading just a short preview will not make you appreciate how well written it is, and how the author really made me care about Fereiba’s plight.