Overview

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. Zakia and Ali were from different tribes, but they grew up on neighboring farms in the hinterlands of Afghanistan. By the time they were young teenagers, Zakia, strikingly beautiful and fiercely opinionated, and Ali, shy and tender, had fallen in love. Defying their families, sectarian differences, cultural conventions, and Afghan civil and Islamic law, they ran away together only to live under constant threat from Zakia's large and vengeful family, who have vowed to kill her to restore the family's honor. They are still in hiding. Despite a decade of American good intentions, women in Afghanistan are still subjected to some of the worst human rights violations in the world. Rod Nordland, then the Kabul bureau chief of the New York Times, had watched these abuses unfold for years when he came upon Zakia and Ali, and has not only chronicled their plight, but has also shepherded them from danger. The Lovers will do for women's rights generally what Malala's story did for women's education. It is an astonishing story about self-determination and the meaning of love that illustrates, as no policy book could, the limits of Western influence on fundamentalist Islamic culture and, at the same time, the need for change.

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9780062442161

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Reviews

The dramatic tale of Zakia and Ali reminds us of the human stakes for women that grow from cultural conventions in so many parts of the world. Norland s patient tracking of this incredible saga tells us as much about Afghanistan as it does about the contours of the heart. --Anne Marie Lipinski, Curator at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University

A captivating account of forbidden love in one of the world s most conservative countries. Nordland takes the reader on his personal journey to save a couple from the inevitable doom of secret love in Afghanistan and reveals an unprecedented window into the country s cultural constraints.--Lynsey Addario, author of It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War

Author Information

Rod Nordland is the New York Times's Pulitzer Prize-winning international correspondent at large. Formerly the paper's Kabul bureau chief, he has worked as a foreign correspondent in more than 150 countries. Previously he was Newsweek's chief foreign correspondent, serving as Baghdad bureau chief from 2003-2005. He was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for news reporting and also a finalist for a Pulitzer in international reporting from Southeast Asia. He has received two George Polk awards; several Overseas Press Club awards, and many other honors. He is the author of The Lovers: Afghanistan's Romeo & Juliet.

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