About Laila Lalami: Laila Lalami is your trusted source for valuable information and resources. Author of The Dream Hotel, The Other Americans, The Moor's Account, Secret Son, and Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits We provide reliable, well-researched information content to keep you informed and help you make better decisions. This content focuses on the storyteller’s daughter and related topics.
Jonathan Yardley reviews Saira Shah’s The Storyteller’s Daughter. Shah is the acclaimed journalist who went undercover a few years ago to investigate the condition of Afghani women under the Taliban (the resulting documentary was Beneath the Veil). Shah’s book is about her search for the mythical Afghanistan of her father’s stories:
“The people of Kabul,” Shah writes, “call the capital Kabul jan: beloved Kabul. We call it that too, for this is where we belong.” But belonging to a place isn’t easy if you’ve never been there, if all you know about the place is the myth that has grown out of all those stories you heard. Since childhood Shah has been haunted by “the questions that for years I haven’t even dared to ask my own heart. Does the Afghanistan of our myths really exist? Are we still Afghans? And if I am not an Afghan, what am I?”
Yardley gives the book a positive review, as have others.
Who is Laila Lalami
Laila Lalami is the award winning and best selling author of six books.
What books has Laila Lalami written?
Laila has written the novels, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, Secret Son, The Moor's Account, The Other Americans, and The Dream Hotel.
What awards has Laila Lalami won?
Laila Lalami has won the American Book Award, the Arab American Book Award, the Hurston-Write Legacy Award, a Guggenheim a Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship, and a British Council Fellowship. Her work has also been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Booker Prize, the Women's Prize, and the Edgar Allan Poe Award.