Yasmina Khadra
The Swallows of Kabul
“Stunning. . [Khadra] conveys the physical deprivations and humiliations with a few startling details, but the book’s most devastating sections explore the mental damage of living under such terror. . [This] novel is a surgical strike against fundamentalism more penetrating than anything the Pentagon could devise. ”
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“Yasmina Khadra’s Kabul is hell on earth, a place of hunger, tedium, and stifling fear. ”
— J. M. Coetzee, winner of the
2003 Nobel Prize for Literature
“A brief, despairing novel. . Khadra’s prose is gentle and precise. . Makes a powerful point about what can happen to a man when ‘the light of his conscience has gone out. ’ ” —The New Yorker
“Chilling. . Powerful, surreal. . A meditation on the ultimate sacrifice of love. . [Khadra] expertly reveals the breakdown of human relations in a repressive society. ”
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“I am so grateful that
— Azar Nafisi, author of
“Places the reader not only inside the daily rhythms of Kabul but trapped, as well, beneath a woman’s burqa. . Khadra exemplifies the novelist’s gift: he bestows an emotional life and voice on those who have been alienated and silenced.
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“Khadra writes with economy, saying a lot with a little. . His style is as spare and flinty as the craggy hills that surround the city. .
“Powerful. . Communicates a sense of urgency, as if its creator knew he was on the verge of being found out. . What gives
“Riveting. . Thrilling, horrifying. . Khadra’s snapshots of Kabul are the stuff of Dante’s
“[A] wrenchingly beautiful novel. . [Khadra’s] strength as a writer lies in his precisely passionate phrases, his psychological probings, and the gnarled and twisted relationships he conjures up between endless war and relentless theocracy. There is a lyrical starkness to his prose that you just want to read out loud to capture its searing rhythms and perfect cadences. . This is a brilliant, resolute, elegiac novel that not only hurts but, in the sheer beauty of its style, also exhilarates and creates sublimely tragic moments you will never forget. ”