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Shadow City  By  cover art

Shadow City

By: Taran N. Khan
Narrated by: Shernaz Patel
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Publisher's summary

Winner, Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year

Winner, Tata Literature Live! First Book Award 2020 - Nonfiction

"A fabulous piece of writing.... I recommend it unreservedly." (William Dalrymple)

"A brilliant book." (Christina Lamb)

When Taran N. Khan first arrived in Kabul in the spring of 2006 - five years after the Taliban government was overthrown - she found a city both familiar and unknown. Falling in with poets, archaeologists, and filmmakers, she begins to explore the city, and, over the course of several returns, discovers a Kabul quite different from the one she had expected.

Shadow City is an account of these expeditions, a personal and meditative portrait of a city we know primarily in terms of conflict. With Khan as our guide, we move from the glitter of wedding halls to the imperiled beauty of a Buddhist monastery, slip inside a beauty salon and wander through book markets. But as these walks take us deeper into the city, it becomes clear that to talk of Kabul's various wars in the past tense is a mistake.

Part reportage and part reflection, Shadow City is an elegiac prose map of Kabul's hidden spaces - and the cities that we carry within us.

©2019 Taran N. Khan (P)2021 Random House Audio

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