The Patience Stone

This explosive, controversial and moving short novel - winner of France's prestigious Goncourt Prize - is a compelling look behind the veil that confronts taboos of female oppression and sexuality.

A deceptively simple book, written in a spare, poetic style. But it is a rich read... It is without doubt an important and courageous book

Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns

This is a remarkable novel, written with a beautiful lucidity... it is a book which achieves what imaginative literature can provide better than any art form: it makes you think and feel at the same time

An important and shocking polemic; it will outrage readers for the truths it reveals

We know so little about the day-to-day life of people in Afghanistan - and in particular its women - that glittering gems such as this ... become all the more valuable for shining a torch on a beleaguered and largely unseen existence

Her monologue is a direct attempt on the part of Rahimi to rip away the veil over Afghan women's lives... An act of political courage and a beautifully constructed, deeply memorable novella

Powerful... truly an expansive work of literature

One thinks of Marguerite Duras, the plays of Sartre, the absurdity of Samuel Beckett, even of Ernest Hemingway. Strangely beautiful, poignant, by turns light and serious... The Patience Stone is one of those rare novels which make time elastic; too short, it can be read in one go, yet it never leaves you

An astonishing writer: this book is another brilliant triumph

Atiq Rahimi's prose is spare and elegant and sporadically mutates into shards of evocative poetry. Polly McLean's translation does justice to the original French

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 is adapting his second novel, A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear, for the screen. 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.

A young woman prays at her husband's bedside as he lies in a coma with a bullet in his neck. From outside come the sounds of tanks, gunshots, screaming and, most terrifying of all, silence. Inside, her two frightened daughters call to her from the hallway. 
 
As she tries to keep her husband alive, the woman rages against men, war, culture, God. Even as her mind appears to unravel, she becomes intensely clear-sighted. Now is her chance - her first ever - to speak without being censored. Her husband's body reminds her of the legend of the patience stone, a stone that hears all confessions until it explodes, and finally, spurred to new heights of daring, she spills out her most explosive secret.

A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear

The extraordinary work of the Afghan writer Atiq Rahimi allows us a rare insight into Afghanistan. With A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear comes a beautiful short novel about an Afghan student seeking freedom from politics and religious fundamentalism.

The novella is verbal photography...[it] seems the real thing...seamlessly translated

A taut and brilliant burst of anguished prose...both a wonderful and a dreadful little book

Short but powerful...The beauty of the language lends this work a haunting clarity

[An] intimate gem of a story...bewitching

Writers’ and Critics’ pick of 2006, Guardian

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.

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.

Earth and Ashes

'It has the feel of a book of great antiquity and authority; you could more readily level the Afghan mountains than damage the dreaming culture that Earth and Ashes both embodies and silently trusts' The Times

Novel, short story, fable? - it doesn't matter. This short book has a sadness that breaks your heart and a visual beauty shot through with the horror of war. Every word, every tear, every gesture is significant

Dense, provocative and, most of all revelatory

With this novel Rahimi picks up a shard of broken glass and sees the whole truth of his devastated country

Earth and Ashes is a story of such spareness and power it leaves the reader reeling. Set during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, it is a fable about war, family, home and tradition. An old man and his grandson sit in a deserted landscape of dusty roads and looming mountains. What are they waiting for? As we watch them we learn their story... 
 
Atiq Rahimi has managed to condense centuries of Afghan history into his short tale of three very different generations. At the same time, he has created a story that is universal in its power.

Atiq Rahimi

Atiq Rahimi brilliantly re-imagines Crime and Punishment and, in a daring feat of creative panache, transplants Dostoevsky’s classic morality tale to modern-day Afghanistan. This is easily Rahimi’s most imaginative and complex work yet, and should cement his reputation as a writer of great and unique vision.

This book is a novel of the exterior, which breathes the very dust of Kabul, the geography, both personal and political, of its alleys and districts… Welcome to Kabul, [a place] with faith but without laws.

This is more a novel to chew over than gobble down

For every crime, there must be a punishment… 
 
Rassoul’s world consists of little more than a squalid rented room – strewn with books by Dostoevsky, relics from his days as a student of Russian Literature at Leningrad – and his beloved fiancée Sophia, for whom he would do anything. 
 
So when he finds himself committing a murder, axe in hand, as if re-enacting the opening of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, his identification with the novel’s anti-hero is complete: Rassoul is Raskolnikov, transplanted to late twentieth-century Kabul. Amid the war-torn streets, Rassoul searches for the meaning of his crime. Instead he is pulled into a feverish plot thick with murder, guilt, morality and Sharia law, where the lines between fact and fiction, dream and reality, become dangerously blurred. 
 
Blackly comic, with flashes of poetry as well as brilliant irony, Atiq Rahimi's latest novel is an ingenious recasting of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece and a transgressive satire with a frightening resonance all its own.

Atiq Rahimi

Praise for A Curse on Dostoevsky

Atiq Rahimi brilliantly re-imagines Crime and Punishment and, in a daring feat of creative panache, transplants Dostoevsky’s classic morality tale to modern-day Afghanistan. This is easily Rahimi’s most im ...

This book is a novel of the exterior, which breathes the very dust of Kabul, the geography, both personal and political, of its alleys and districts… Welcome to Kabul, [a place] with faith but without laws.

This is more a novel to chew over than gobble down

Atiq Rahimi brilliantly re-imagines Crime and Punishment and, in a daring feat of creative panache, transplants Dostoevsky’s classic morality tale to modern-day Afghanistan. This is easily Rahimi’s most im ...

This book is a novel of the exterior, which breathes the very dust of Kabul, the geography, both personal and political, of its alleys and districts… Welcome to Kabul, [a place] with faith but without laws.

This is more a novel to chew over than gobble down

Atiq Rahimi brilliantly re-imagines Crime and Punishment and, in a daring feat of creative panache, transplants Dostoevsky’s classic morality tale to modern-day Afghanistan. This is easily Rahimi’s most im ...

This book is a novel of the exterior, which breathes the very dust of Kabul, the geography, both personal and political, of its alleys and districts… Welcome to Kabul, [a place] with faith but without laws.

This is more a novel to chew over than gobble down

Books by Atiq Rahimi

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