The Storyteller's Daughter by Saira Shah

The Storyteller's Daughter by Saira Shah

Imagine that a jewel-like garden overlooking Kabul is your ancestral home. Imagine a kitchen made fragrant with saffron strands and cardamom pods simmering in an authentic pilau. Now remember that you were born in London, your family in exile, and that you have never seen Afghanistan in peacetime.
These are but the starting points of Saira Shah's memoir, by turns inevitably exotic and unavoidably heartbreaking, in which she explores her family's history in and out of Afghanistan. As an accomplished journalist and documentarian-her film Beneath the Veil unflinchingly depicted for CN viewers the humiliations forced on women under Taliban rule-Shah returned to her family's homeland cloaked in the burqa to witness the pungent and shocking realities of Afghan life. As the daughter of the Sufi fabulist Idries Shah, primed by a lifetime of listening to her father's stories, she eagerly sought out, from the mouths of Afghan refugees in Pakistan, the rich and living myths that still sustain this battered culture of warriors. And she discovered that in Afghanistan all the storytellers have been men-until now.

Saira Shah lives in London and is a freelance journalist. She was born in Britain of an Afghan family, the daughter of Idries Shah, a writer of Sufi fables. She first visited Afghanistan at age twenty-one and worked there for three years as a freelance journalist, covering the guerilla war against the Soviet occupiers. Later, working for Britain's Channel 4 News, she covered some of the world's most troubled spots, including Algeria, Kosovo, and Kinshasa, as well as Baghdad and other parts of the Middle East. Her documentary Beneath the Veil was broadcast on CNN.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781400031474
ISBN 10	1400031478
Title	The Storyteller's Daughter
Author	Saira Shah
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Random House USA Inc
Year published	2004-10-12
Number of pages	272
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.