THE SLEEPING BUDDHA
Author: Hamida Ghafour
ISBN: 9781552786932
Price: $16.95

An evocative family memoir and unique portrait of Afghanistan from a young, Afghan-born Canadian journalist

Hamida Ghafour's family fled the Soviet invasion in 1981 and settled in Canada where she grew up.

In 2003 she returned as a journalist for the Globe and Mail and the London Daily Telegraph to cover the post-Taliban era. She finds a place utterly changed from the world which her parents raised her to believe in. Changed, even, from the world of her grandmother, an early Afghan feminist.

All around her is the West's first post-9/11 experiment in building an Islamic democracy. But the people she meets reveal a different kind of nation building: her cousin's determined parliamentary campaign, the beautician without borders who teaches women a new kind of independence; the archaeologist digging for his nation's lost civilization in the form of a giant, sleeping Buddha.

As she participates in her country's present, its elusive past and her family's own story come vividly together. But only when she is standing by her grandmother's grave — after a heavily escorted Chinook trip to the wildest corner of the land — does she start to find her own place in it all