A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear - Softcover

Rahimi, Atiq

Softcover

ISBN 10: 009946196X ISBN 13: 9780099461968

Publisher: Vintage, 2007

Synopsis

Kabul, 1979. A student wakes in an unfamiliar house, battered and bruised. He gradually recovers his mind to discover that returning from a night out he was brutally attacked by soldiers and left to die.

Farhad, the tragic hero of this nightmarish tale, realises that he can now never return home: to do so would be to risk the lives of his family. As he waits for an answer to his plight he learns the tragic story of the woman who has saved him, endangering her own life in the process, and begins to feel an impossible and forbidden love for her - a love that embodies an angry compassion for the suffering of Afghanistan's women, and the yearning for a lost home.

About this title

Review:

"The novella is verbal photography...[it] seems the real thing...seamlessly translated" (Russell Celyn Jones The Times)

"A taut and brilliant burst of anguished prose...both a wonderful and a dreadful little book" (Guardian)

"A beautiful piece of writing" (Ruth Pavey Independent)

"Short but powerful...The beauty of the language lends this work a haunting clarity" (The Herald)

"[An] intimate gem of a story...bewitching" (Scotland on Sunday)

From the Publisher:

The extraordinary work of the Afghan writer Atiq Rahimi allows us a rare insight into Afghanistan. After Earth and Ashes (published around the world and made into a feature film) comes an amazing short novel about an Afghan student seeking freedom from politics and religious fundamentalism.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 009946196X
• ISBN 13: 9780099461968
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160