The Lovers

Description

***Now with an updated afterword from the author about the current state of the couple*** A riveting, real-life equivalent of THE KITE RUNNER - an astonishingly powerful and profoundly moving story of a young couple willing to risk everything for love that puts a human face on the ongoing debate about women's rights in the Muslim world. "She is his Juliet and he is her Romeo, and her family has threatened to kill them both..." This is the heartrending account of Zakia and Mohammad Ali, a couple from opposing Islamic sects, who defying their society's norms have left behind everything they know and are quite literally risking their lives for their love. She is a Sunni, he is a Shia, but as friends from childhood Zakia and Mohammad Ali could never have predicted that their love would anger their families so much that they would be forced to leave their homes finding refuge in the harsh terrain of the Afghani mountains. Without money or passports they rely on the kindness of strangers to house them for a couple of days at a time as they remain on the run, never deterred. New York Times journalist, Rod Nordland, has chronicled the plight of the young lovers telling their extraordinary story of courage, perseverance and love in one of the world's most troubled countries. This moving love story is told against the bigger backdrop of the horrific but widespread practices that women are subjected to in Afghanistan.

Rod Nordland is currently a correspondent-at-large for The New York Times, working throughout the Middle East and South Asia; he spent more than three years as the paper's bureau chief in Kabul. He shared a Pulitzer Prize for reporting in the US, was a Pulitzer Finalist for International Reporting, studied as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, and has received many honors including two George Polk awards and half a dozen Overseas Press Club awards. Nordland has worked for three decades as a foreign correspondent in over 150 countries. When not in Kabul, his second home is London.

With keen and nuanced insight, Nordland details the tortuous road that Zakia and Ali travelled...Nordland became the pair's chronicler and, later, their unofficial protector when, straining the limits of his professional involvement with them, he began to help the pair financially. Meticulously reported and written, Nordland's book is an exceptionally well-delineated glimpse into the marriage practices of a closed patriarchal society and the suffering it has caused women. The author thoughtfully considers the extent to which the West, acting from the outside, can effect social reform in Muslim fundamentalist cultures. A provocative, well-told story of love at all costs and an incisive examination of the continued violation of women's rights in Afghanistan. - Kirkus In Nordland's telling, the pair emerge as fully rounded characters even while serving as symbols of Afghan culture's stifling restraints. From the couple's initial elopement to their unexpected elevation to media prominence ... Nordland's storytelling remains gripping, with more than a hint of Shakespearean drama. The couple's survival, in the face of familial and societal condemnation, provides a happy if incomplete resolution... less uplifting is Nordland's reporting on the overall situation for women in Afghanistan, a country that Massouda Jalal, former Afghan minister for women's affairs, calls "the worst place in the world to be a woman. - Publishers Weekly The Lovers is a heartbreaking tale of illicit love and religious persecution. Rod Nordland seamlessly weaves the personal and the political in urgent, effortless prose to tell a story that is not only beautifully written but also vitally important for our times. - Amanda Foreman, Chair of the Man Booker Prize Rod Nordland develops a captivating and beautifully-written true story of an elopement into an analysis of Afghan misogyny and domestic violence which reveals more about conservative Afghan life and the struggle to change it than most other non-fiction books about the country. - The Guardian