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It's September 2002 one year after 9/11 and the US invasion of Afghanistan. A U.S. army medical technician is taken captive by Afghan rebels while on a recce mission and thrown into an asylum with a dozen or so other inmates. Are they refugees from the war. Derelicts. Fugitives on the run. Men and women mad with grief and loss or just exhausted by the repeated violation of their country. This astonishingly powerful novel unfolds the tragedy of Afghanistan as told by the captive narrator in hauntingly beautiful prose. As the characters try to cope with their individual destinies in the asylum's compound the terrible madness of war is counterpointed with the poignancy of their lives and the narrator's own peculiar predicament the victor now a victim his ambivalence a metaphor for everything Afghanistan symbolises. In a stunning denouement the author makes clear that there is no winning this war there is only a ravaged country and those who mange to survive its insanity. |
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