A Door in the Earth - Hardcover

Waldman, Amy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316451576 ISBN 13: 9780316451574

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, 1900

Synopsis

From the author of the national bestseller The Submission comes the journey of a young Afghan-American woman trapped between her ideals and the complicated truth in this "penetrating" (O, Oprah Magazine), "stealthily suspenseful," (Booklist, starred review), "breathtaking and achingly nuanced" (Kirkus, starred review) novel for readers of Cutting for Stone and The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
Parveen Shams, a college senior in search of a calling, feels pulled between her charismatic and mercurial anthropology professor and the comfortable but predictable Afghan-American community in her Northern California hometown. When she discovers a bestselling book called Mother Afghanistan, a memoir by humanitarian Gideon Crane that has become a bible for American engagement in the country, she is inspired. Galvanized by Crane's experience, Parveen travels to a remote village in the land of her birth to join the work of his charitable foundation.
When she arrives, however, Crane's maternity clinic, while grandly equipped, is mostly unstaffed. The villagers do not exhibit the gratitude she expected to receive. And Crane's memoir appears to be littered with mistakes, or outright fabrications. As the reasons for Parveen's pilgrimage crumble beneath her, the U.S. military, also drawn by Crane's book, turns up to pave the solde road to the village, bringing the war in their wake. When a fatal ambush occurs, Parveen must decide whether her loyalties lie with the villagers or the soldiers -- and she must determine her own relationship to the truth.
Amy Waldman, who reported from Afghanistan for the New York Times after 9/11, has created a taut, propulsive novel about power, perspective, and idealism, brushing aside the dust of America's longest-standing war to reveal the complicated truths beneath. A Door in the Earth is the rarest of books, one that helps us understand living history through poignant characters and unforgettable storytelling.

About this title

Review

"A masterful debut...Dazzlingly crafted...Waldman unspools her story with the truth-bound grit of a seasoned journalist and the elegance of a born novelist."--Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly

"Moving...Eloquent...A coherent, timely, and fascinating examination of a grieving America's relationship with itself."--Chris Cleave, Washington Post

"Elegantly written and tightly plotted...In these unnerving times, in which Waldman has seen facts take the shape of her fiction, a historian's novel at once lucid, illuminating and entertaining is a necessary and valuable gift."--Claire Messud, The New York Times Book Review

"With A Door in the Earth, Amy Waldman more than confirms the great talent that she showed in her first novel, The Submission. A Door in the Earth plays on true events in Afghanistan -- a country Waldman knows well from her career as a journalist -- but wholly reimagines them in a way that raises urgent questions about the ethics of 'saving' people we don't know. I haven't read anything more acute about the consequences of good American intentions sent abroad. Waldman's moral vision, spare and unsparing prose style, and feel for the way history upsets settled lives all make A Door in the Earth one of the essential books of the post-9/11 era."--George Packer, National Book Award winner for The Unwinding

"Some stories stick with you, becoming like your own memories. When I finished the last page of this book I could've sworn it had all happened to me."--Elliot Ackerman, National Book Award finalist for Dark at the Crossing

"Amy Waldman brings her fierce intelligence and breathtaking descriptive powers to bear in this brilliant, unsentimental novel about what happens when Americans go adventuring abroad. The author's vast experience in the region is evident in the vividness with which she creates the social world of an Aghan mountain village. But the miracle of A Door in the Earth is that a novel which tackles such urgent and necessary questions of politics, history, and the compromises of war can also be so unflaggingly searing and gripping, and bring its characters so indelibly to life."--Nell Freudenberger, New York Times bestselling author of Lost and Wanted

"Waldman is an ingenious and probing situational novelist . . . In this deeply well-informed, utterly engrossing, mischievously disarming, and stealthily suspenseful tale of slow and painful realizations, she hits the mark over and over again . . . Every aspect of this complex and caustic tale of hype and harm is saturated with insight and ruefulness as Parveen wises up and Waldman considers womanhood and choice, literacy and translation, hubris and lies, unintended consequences, and the devastating chaos of war."--Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

Praise for THE SUBMISSION:
"Affecting...Nervy and absorbing...Writing in limber, detailed prose, Waldman has created a choral novel with a big historical backdrop and pointillist emotional detail...It is Ms. Waldman's ability to depict grief and anger that lends The Submission its extraordinary emotional ballast."--Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"Through a kaleidoscope of shifting perspectives, Waldman delivers a breathtaking and achingly nuanced examination of the grays in a landscape where black and white answers have long been the only currency. A bone-chilling takedown of America's misguided use of soft power."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"In her illuminating second novel, Waldman unpeels layers of cultural conditioning to explore the American use of 'kind power.'"--BBC, Ten Books to Read This August

About the Author

Amy Waldman's first novel, The Submission, was a national bestseller, a PEN/Hemingway Award finalist, and the #1 Book of the Year for Entertainment Weekly and Esquire. A former bureau chief for The New York Times and national correspondent for The Atlantic as well as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute and the American Academy in Berlin, she lives with her family in Brooklyn.

About this edition

• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
• Publication date: 1900
• ISBN 10: 0316451576
• ISBN 13: 9780316451574
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 388