Farishta (Unabridged‪)‬

An American diplomat is forced to confront the devastation of her past when she is assigned to remote Northern Afghanistan.

In 1983 junior diplomat and brilliant linguist Angela Morgan witnessed the death of her young husband during the bombing of the US embassy in Beirut. Devastated by her loss, she fled back to Washington, DC, and hid in the backwaters of the US State Department. With the exception of a two-year tour of duty in the former Soviet Union in the late '80s, she managed for almost two decades to avoid high-profile postings that would advance her career. Now, with that career about to dead end and no true connections at home, she must take the one assignment available - at a remote British army outpost in Northern Afghanistan. Unwelcome among the soldiers and unaccepted by the local government and warlords, Angela has to fight to earn the respect of her colleagues, especially the enigmatic Mark Davies, a British major who is by turns her staunchest ally and her fiercest critic. Frustrated at her inability to contribute to the nation's reconstruction, Angela slips out of camp disguised in a burka to provide aid to the refugees in the war-torn region. She becomes their farishta ("angel" in the local Dari language), discovers a new purpose for her life, and finds a way to finally put her grief behind her. Drawing on the author's own experiences as a diplomat in Northern Afghanistan, Farishta is a deeply moving and fast-paced story of a woman struggling to move beyond a past trauma who finds a new community, a new love, and a new sense of self in the process.