Born Under a Million Shadows: A Novel
*Starred Review* In her indelible first novel, Busfield, a British journalist who has lived in Afghanistan, describes post-Taliban Kabul from the viewpoint of precocious, 11-year-old Fawad, whose impossible losses are commonplace: “My father was killed, my brothers are dead, and my sister is missing. But in Afghanistan, that’s a big ‘so what.’” When his mother secures a job keeping house for three foreigners, Fawad moves from their impoverished relatives’ home into the Westerners’ compound. Over the following year, the foreigners begin to feel like family to Fawad, but Busfield never romanticizes the intractable challenges of cross-cultural understanding: “In many of their ways the foreigners were just like Afghans. . . . But in other ways they were just plain crazy and trying their absolute hardest to burn for all eternity. Worse than that, they all seemed so damned pleased about it.” Fawad has a deep crush on Georgie, a beautiful NGO worker whose passionate affair with a powerful Afghan man prompts Fawad to ask the largest life questions about love, religion, friendship, and identity. Poetic, bawdy, hilarious, and achingly wise, Busfield’s debut is a love story many times over: between a man and a woman, the author and Afghanistan, and an irrepressible boy and the wild world at large. --Gillian Engberg