Daughter mourns the loss of another land

Novel offers a glimpse into Kabul on the brink of invasion, seen through eyes of a child

Nadia Hashimi’s new novel, “Sparks Like Stars,” begins in the spring of 1978, as a coup to overthrow the sitting Afghan president, Daoud Khan, reaches its boiling point within the palace of Kabul. Mirroring real-life events — some experienced by the author, others from before she was born — this story of Cold War politics and those who bore the brunt of government corruption is told from the viewpoint of 10-year-old Sitara, a daughter of the highest ranking advisor to the president.

Sitara and a cast of other statesmen’s children frolic throughout the Arg, dreaming of ancient treasure and magical creatures, playing pranks on palace guards, and reenacting scenes from Shakespeare and Afghan history books alike. Their idyllic recess is interrupted by a violent coup none except Sitara survives; she manages to escape and eventually makes her way to New York, enduring trials and forming relationships along the way.

“Sparks Like Stars,” by Nadia Hashimi, William Morrow, 464 pages, $34.99

In these early pages Hashimi gives the reader a rather unremarkable glimpse into the culture of 1978 Kabul, on the brink of an invasion and a many years long war. Sitara, and so the reader, spends much of her time confined indoors, nursing her trauma, struggling to speak and listening to other characters — mainly white American women who end up being her saviours, devising her escape to the U.S. while keeping her hidden from the military coup consolidating its power outdoors. Much of the violence of the coup and its fallout is sanitized or elided entirely, perhaps as it would be through the eyes of a 10-yearold.

In the second half Sitara, now going by Aryana, is a talented oncologist living in

Queens with a wry sense of humour and a fair amount of unaddressed PTSD. This part of the story is much more successful, borrowing from Hashimi’s own life as a pediatrician and native New Yorker. (The Afghan American experience is familiar ground in Hashimi’s many other titles exploring this intersecting identity, often through the perspective of children.) Beneath this veneer of adaptation, we see the toll of years of secrecy, resulting in heaps of guilt, flashes of vengefulness, and eventually, a journey toward resolution.

At times, the prose tends toward sentimentality and melodrama, with characters we had left for dead in Kabul popping up in unexpected places. There are several meet-cutes, scumbag New York politicians, a Black best friend (who is no more than a token, inhabiting merely a few pages).

What Hashimi does well is offer glances, however brief, of a complex relationship to nationalism and identity, what it means to be American as you mourn the loss of another land, and the relationship Hashimi seems to be negotiating between her own medical practice and those who have survived war.