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Imprint: Chatto & Windus
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Published: 05/12/2019
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ISBN: 9781784742287
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Length: 272 Pages
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Dimensions: 222mm x 29mm x 144mm
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Weight: 407g
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RRP: £14.99
Shadow City
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A Woman Walks Kabul
Winner of the Tata Literature Live First Book Award for Non-Fiction 2020
Shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award 2021
'A fabulous piece of writing . . . I recommend it unreservedly' WILLIAM DALRYMPLE
'A brilliant book' CHRISTINA LAMB
One of the first things I was told when I arrived in Kabul was never to walk...
When Indian journalist Taran Khan arrives in Kabul in 2006, she imagines it as a return to the land her forebears hailed from centuries ago. It is a city both familiar and unknown. She finds an unexpected guide in her grandfather who - despite never visiting the city - knows it intimately through books and stories, poetry and myth. With his voice in her head, and falling in with poets, doctors, actors and other Kabulis, Khan uncovers a place quite different from the one she anticipated.
Her wanderings reveal a fragile city in a state of flux: stricken by near-constant war, but flickering with the promise of peace, a shape-shifting place governed by age-old codes but experimenting with new modes of living. These walks take her to the unvisited tombs of the dead, and to the land of the living: the booksellers, archaeologists, intrepid film-makers and entrepreneurs who are remaking and rebuilding this ancient 3,000-year-old city.
Lost in its labyrinthine streets Khan reads the city more closely, excavating the ghostly iterations of Kabul's past and its layers of forgotten memories - unearthing a city that has been brutally erased and redrawn as each new war sweeps through. And as NATO troops begin to withdraw from the country, Khan watches as her friends and comrades also prepare to depart, and the cycle of transformation begins again. Filled with unique insights about the meaning of home and the haunting power of loss and absence, Taran Khan conjures a magic that is spellbinding and utterly her own.
'A wonderful journey' Atiq Rahimi
'Any reader of this book is sure to discover a Kabul so unlike what the media portrays. Taran's love of her city comes across in her enchanting evocation of a city where so many tragedies echo from across Kabul's decades of war' Raja Shehadeh, author of Palestinian Walks
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Imprint: Chatto & Windus
-
Published: 05/12/2019
-
ISBN: 9781784742287
-
Length: 272 Pages
-
Dimensions: 222mm x 29mm x 144mm
-
Weight: 407g
-
RRP: £14.99
Reviews
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Shadow City is no conventional travel book. For Khan gives us a Kabul of the imagination: it is the city that was, less the city that is, that fascinates her. Her perambulations represent a form of "bipedal archaeology", an exercise in exhuming the past and probing the lost... It is easy to cast Kabul as a tragic mess of a metropolis, but Khan illuminates its life-affirming humanity
Oliver Balch, Times Literary Supplement
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Offers a unique on-the-ground view of the city...a refreshing counterpoint to the macho foreign correspondent genre... Khan’s interviews during her walks powerfully evoke the fluctuating mood in a city that is trying to heal itself
Amelia Gentleman, Guardian
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These stories conjure a magic in the labyrinthine streets and reveal a fragile city in a state of flux, shape-shifting and flickering with the promise of peace
Sophie Lam, i
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Any reader of this book is sure to discover a Kabul so unlike what the media portrays. Taran’s love of her city comes across in her enchanting evocation of a city where so many tragedies echo from across Kabul’s decades of war. On her last walk, she writes: “to leave Kabul was to take it with you.” This is what happened when I finished reading this book, I took Kabul with me
Raja Shehadeh, author of Palestinian Walks
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On the surface, Kabul is a city caught "between the hope of peace and the habit of violence." The deeper reality, though, is even more complex and layered: like Kabul's actual lanes, those that map its character "twist and vanish . . . like well-kept secrets." It is an elusive, illusive place - bood, nabood, now you see it, now you don't. Taran Khan's achievement is to have caught it in an affecting and beautifully observed portrait, a word-map that will endure
Tim Mackintosh-Smith
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By excavating Afghanistan's forgotten past, Khan rescues its future, too. Her lyrical prose brings to life the most daring truth a writer can offer: that these tragedies were not preordained, and another Afghanistan is possible
Anand Gopal, author of No Good Men Among the Living
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A lyrical discovery... As a Muslim woman from India, Khan is able to present a unique social and historical perspective
Edward Girardet, Global Geneva
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Taran Khan invites and leads us into a wonderful journey through the streets of Kabul, its history and culture. Step by step with her, we breathe in the city’s air of mysticism and mystery, walk through gardens full of myths and secrets, and we caress the wounds and scars of war on the skin of the city and cross the bridge that is built over the river between Indo-Greek civilization
Atiq Rahimi
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Shadow City moved me to tears... In the service of Kabul and Afghanistan, a region of the world about which we imagine we know much more than we actually do, no book has done a more honest and heart-warming job in recent years... Thrilling
Supriya Nair, Mumbai Mirror
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Traces the lost glory of the city and narrates contemporary miseries. A moving memoir...and a subtle dive into history
Ashutosh Bhardwaj, Financial Express
