A Fort of Nine Towers
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4.8 • 6 Ratings
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Qais Akbar Omar is 29 years old. His young life coincided with one of the most convulsive decades in Afghan history: civil war, the rise of the Taliban, and the arrival of international troops in 2001.
A Fort of Nine Towers - named for the place his parents first sought shelter from war - is the story of Qais' family and their remarkable survival. A group of tenacious and deeply loving people, when the fighting came they were buffeted from one part of Afghanistan to the next "like kittens in the jaws of a lion", setting up camp on the plains, in the famous Buddha caves at Banyam, and with Kuchi nomads, before returning finally to Kabul, where they belong.
Recounting this journey, through terror, loss and heartbreak, Qais' spirit never ceases to shine. This is a book about the power of stories to bring courage, console, and bind a family together, in the face of almost unimaginable odds.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this painstaking memoir, Kabul carpet seller and Brandeis M.B.A. student Omar recreates an idyllic childhood gradually wrecked by years of civil war and Taliban oppression. One of some 25 cousins who had the run of the family compound constructed on the Kot-e-Sangi mountainside of Kabul by his grandfather, a Pashtun banker who was also a carpet seller, Omar enjoyed an insular early upbringing, surrounded by doting aunts and uncles, luxuriant gardens, kite flying, copious meals, and a stringent education at school and from his own father, a physics teacher and former boxer who ran a gym near the house. As the factious mujahideen ("holy warriors") began to fight among each other, living in the compound became untenable, and the extended family took refuge on the other side of the mountain in the mansion owned by his father's carpet-business partner, a former royal residence now semiruined, called the Qala-e-Noborja, or "Fort of the Nine Towers." Over subsequent years of turmoil, Omar and his family managed to survive the violence and instability besieging Afghanistan, and whenever they ventured out for example, when Omar accompanied his grandfather to survey the damage at the old house the results were horrifying. On one of his fantastic nomadic treks north, he even managed to learn carpet-making from a deaf Turkmen girl with exquisite intuitive technique. Omar's tale strains credulity, but his prose is deliciously forthright, extravagant, somewhat mischievous, and very Afghan in its sense of long-suffering endurance and also reconciliation.
