My Dear Kabul

‘A real-time, moving and intimate portrait of a year living under the Taliban, communicated via clandestine WhatsApp messages’
SERVICE95

‘An intimate, courageous chronicle of life as it unfolds under Taliban rule’
OBSERVER, *Book of the Day*

‘A hugely important book’
BERNARDINE EVARISTO

‘A deeply moving collective memoir’
LYSE DOUCET

In August 2021, as the Taliban approached the gates of Kabul, twenty-one women writers in Afghanistan came online in their WhatsApp chat group: they asked what news others had heard and if everyone was safe.

These women had been brought together as a writing group. They were about to publish their first collection of short stories, while working regular day jobs. Some were students, some newly married, one was a grandmother: all were afraid of what was now to come. Over the next year, in the makeshift refuge of their WhatsApp group, they shared the day-to-day reality of life after a fall.

Publishing on the anniversary of the Fall of Kabul, this is the women’s courageous collective diary: in it the writers watch cities transform, schools close, families change and freedoms disappear. They share stories of chaos, protest and flight – and of life continuing. Check-points are a daily trial; men start behaving differently. Children can’t afford the ice-cream man’s wares; passports are near impossible to obtain. Together, their messages form a powerful chorus of resistance and solidarity.

‘Its courage is momentous’
ALI SMITH