It will leave you with a lump in your throat and a heavy heart full of possibilities, much like the women pouring their hearts out in this collection. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. The West has a disgusting tendency to use Afghan women as their political pawns; often without letting Afghan women speak for themselves. Like any book with various authors and many short stories, not all of them will necessarily be right for you.

This is a life changing book, it makes you re-think so many things, re-evaluate what’s really important in life, we may all share the same planet, but we do not share the same lives in any way. My Pen is the Wing of a Bird is a completely haunting collection of stories by Afghan women, who detail the bleak and harrowing world that they live in, as well as the world that they wish it to be. This is one hell of a powerful book and I want to slap people round the face with it to make them read it. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around October 18, 2022.Here we have stories of the everyday and extraordinary lives of Afghan women, all of them written before the Taliban took power in August 2021. But today girls and women are being deprived of this fundamental right: they are no longer allowed to attend secondary school and higher education, which must be having an impact on primary school enrollment (if it is even allowed in practice and not just rhetoric from an abhorrent “government”). So no matter what atrocities and struggles are mentioned in this anthology, things are even worse now. Many thanks to Grand Central Publishing and NetGalley for the digital copy of this powerful and thought-provoking collection of stories.

One of the many joys of reading is that the literature of a world far from our own has the potential to alter how we see ourselves. Zubair Popalzai), a woman motivates the other women in the village to band together to dig ditches to save their village from flooding. Through tiny observations we, as readers, can identify with the plight of so many women in Afghanistan, whose daily lives are.There are young women who yearn to go to school, widows who mourn their lost husbands and don't want to remarry, men who work as scribes for court complaints and barely make a living to get by, mothers who are separated by continents from their children, women who have been forced to immigrate to the United States and can never find the same comfort and happiness they left behind, and more. Skausmingos, tragiškos, kai kurios viltingos istorijos apie kasdienį, pagrinde moterų, (ne)(iš)gyvenimą. The fact that the book has now been published is the result of a team effort that “relied on everybody trusting each other”, says Hannah. Running through several stories is a sense of loneliness, how a war situation adds another dimension to endemic volatility under Taliban rule, it really affects individuals.

The sacrifices people make for one another and the unbreakable attachment people have to home, no matter what hell that home may host, are repeated notes that echo in the heart. It is impossible to read this book and not be affected by it – I was in turn saddened, enraged and incredibly moved by these stories and needed to take breaks in between.The stories are of family, betrayal, friendship and love, many set against a back drop of real life events. She has been reporting from Afghanistan since 1988 when she lived in Kabul and has been a frequent visitor ever since.