In Kabul we meet Fereiba, a schoolteacher, and her husband, Mahmoud, a man whose love for her was greater than any love she’d ever known. But Fereiba’s middle-class world of education, work and comfortable family life implodes when the Taliban rises to power. Mahmoud, a civil engineer, becomes a target of the new regime and is murdered by local henchmen.Forced to flee Taliban-controlled Kabul with her three children,Fereiba has only one option: find a way to cross Europe and reach her sister’s family in England, who have offered them asylum.With forged papers and help from kind strangers, they cross the mountains into Iran by night. Exhausted and brokenhearted but undefeated, Fereiba manages to smuggle them as far as Greecebut in a busy market square, their fate takes another turn for the worse when her teenage son Saleem becomes separated from the rest of the family. Faced with an almost unimaginable choice,Fereiba makes the desperate decision to continue on to London with her daughter and baby while Saleem falls into the shadowy underground network of undocumented Afghans who haunt the streets of Europe ‘s capitals. From the refugee camps of Greece, through Rome and even Paris, Fereiba and Saleem struggle to reunite, to survive and to find a place where they can begin to reconstruct their lives. Like The Pearl That Broke Its Shell, this is a heartfelt revelation of a novel, extremely readable and thought-provoking, with characters who haunt the reader long after the last page is turned. And yes, like Pearl, this is a page-turner that ends happily.

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