Tariq tucked the gun into the waist of his denims. Then he said a thing both lovely and terrible. "For you," he said. "I'd kill with it for you, Laila.

Inside Laila too a battle was being waged : guilt on one side, partnered with shame, and, on the other, the conviction that what she and Tariq had done was not sinful; that it had been natural, good, beautiful, even inevitable, spurred by the knowledge that they might never see each other again.

it is a heartBreaking sound, Amir Jan, the Wailing of a mother. I pray to Allah you Never hear it.

The short of it is, as an aspiring writer, there is nothing as damaging to your credibility as saying that you don't like to read.

The [George W.] Bush administration tripled its aid package to Afghanistan. [Hamid] Karzai finally (and courageously) announced that warlords will be forbidden from holding office in the future government. And finally, NATO agreed to expand the peacekeeping forces to troubled areas outside of Kabul.

But Laila has decided that she will not be crippled by resentment. Mariam wouldn’t want it that way. ‘What’s the sense?’ she would say with a smile both innocent and wise. ‘What good is it, Laila jo?’ And so Laila has resigned herself to moving on. For her own sake, for Tariq’s, for her children’s. And for Mariam, who still visits Laila in her dreams, who is never more than a breath or two below her consciousness. Laila has moved on. Because in the end she knows that’s all she can do. That and hope.

I did see [in Afghanistan] plenty that reminded me of my childhood. I recognised my old neighbourhood, saw my old school, streets where I had played with my brother and cousins.