A Fort of Nine Towers
A True Life Account of Growing up in Afghanistan
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
'To read this book is to understand Afghanistan as it exists today. This haunting memoir traces the unimaginable odyssey of one family whose world has collapsed . . . Poetic, powerful, and unforgettable.' – Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns.
A true life account of growing up in Afghanistan, Qais Akbar Omar recounts his happy childhood in Kabul, his journeys with his family across Afghanistan in search of a safe haven, and life under the Taliban rule as a young man.
Qais was eleven when a brutal civil war engulfed Kabul. For Qais, it brought an abrupt end to a childhood filled with kites and cousins in his grandfather's garden: one of the most convulsive decades in Afghan history had begun. Ahead lay the rise of the Taliban, and, in 2001, the arrival of international forces.
A Fort of Nine Towers is the story of Qais, his family and their determination to survive these upheavals as they were buffeted from one part of Afghanistan to the next. Drawing strength from each other, and their culture and faith, they sought refuge for a time in the Buddha caves of Bamyan, and later with a caravan of Kuchi nomads. When they eventually returned to Kabul, it became clear that their trials were just beginning . . .
'Even more haunting than The Kite Runner, because it's not fiction.' – Philidelphia Inquirer
'Here at last is a powerful memoir that does justice to its tough, tenacious and astonishingly good-humoured people. The best thing about it . . . is that it is a book about Afghanistan written by an Afghan.' – Evening Standard
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.
