About this item
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 the Author
Amy Waldman turned to fiction writing after fifteen years as a journalist, and she has published two novels: A Door in the Earth and The Submission, which was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Debut Fiction award and was named #1 book of the year by Entertainment Weekly and Esquire. She was a reporter for The New York Times for eight years, including three as co-chief of the South Asia bureau. The territory she covered included Afghanistan, where A Door in the Earth is set. She has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the American Academy in Berlin. Her fiction has appeared in the Boston Review and the Atlantic and was anthologized in The Best American Non-Required Reading 2010. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she now lives with her husband and nine-year-old twins in Brooklyn.
