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‘The world turned its back’: Nadia Hashimi on Afghanistan, resistance and City of Widows

Nadia Hashimi on her new novel, City of Widows, the world turning is back on Afghanistan and why she hopes her book will evoke outrage

Nadia Hashimi’s new novel, City of Widows, is a sequel to her debut, The Pearl That Broke Its Shell (2014).

5 min readAfghanistanAug 6, 2026 06:49 PM IST First published on: Jul 31, 2026 at 05:59 PM IST

Nadia Hashimi’s new novel, City of Widows, opens in the precarious years before the 2021 Taliban takeover, back when Afghan women were still soldiers, journalists, and pursuing an array of professions. Hashimi evokes that bygone world to show us exactly what was lost. The book, a story of resistance, grips you by the cuff from the get-go, plunging the reader into a relentless sequence of unbearably tense moments that never loosen their hold.

Its fascinating title comes from a real settlement on a hillside outside Kabul known as Zanabad, which literally translates to ‘city of women’ but is referred to as ‘hill of widows’ in Afghanistan. Hoping to escape the stigma, widows started inhabiting the hills in the 1990s, forming a tightly knit community where they could eke out independence, as per a 2017 AFP report.

Hashimi says she would never have thought that she would one day write the sequel to The Pearl That Broke Its Shell (2014), her internationally acclaimed debut, which just goes on to prove ‘never say never’. She was inspired to write this story when she came across an article about Afghan women soldiers, one of whom said, “If I die tonight, I die pretty.”

It was that AFP article that planted the seed for Hashimi’s novel. “I don’t actually know how I first came about it, but I did find an article,” she told The Indian Express. “And this is where a lot of my stories come from — these journalistic pieces where there’s either a line in a piece of journalism or an introduction to something. Whenever I find something that surprises me, I feel like that’s where the story is going.”

City of Widows follows three women. Marjan, a former soldier in the Afghan army, is on the run with her young daughter Hawa, desperate to escape before the Taliban discovers her past. In her earlier life, she was Rahima, a bacha posh — a girl raised as a boy — forced into an early marriage from which she fled. Soraya, who defiantly wore red lipstick as she led the army’s all-female combat unit, is now a wanted woman whose own brother may not shelter her. Mina, a journalist and broadcaster, is known to everyone in Kabul, including the new regime.

Hashimi, a paediatrician-turned-novelist and the daughter of Afghan immigrants, conducted in-depth interviews to flesh out her protagonists. She spoke to a commander of the Female Tactical Platoon, a musician who conducted the Zohra Orchestra, and a woman who runs shelters for the vulnerable. “I always try to be authentic when it comes to these social aspects within the country,” she said. “There are so many misrepresentations and stereotypes that are opposite of what these women are actually experiencing.”

The bacha posh tradition, central to Marjan’s backstory, reveals everything about Afghanistan’s relationship with gender. “It reveals the difference in the value placed on a son and a daughter,” Hashimi said. Families engage in the practice either from superstition — believing the next child will be a boy — or “to logistically have a child who can navigate the outside world with a little bit more freedom and maybe with less risk.” She predicted that as women develop economic value, the practice would fade. “But with the Taliban coming back and making life impossible for girls, you can see where it would be really necessary to have a way to skirt around these rules.”

That sense of a world turning its back animates the novel. “It felt like the world overnight decided they did not want to care about Afghanistan anymore,” Hashimi said. “We had had 20 years of saying we must fight the Taliban in Afghanistan because we must liberate Afghan women. And then, overnight, it was like, ‘Well, actually, we are just kind of tired of doing this and we are going to turn our backs.”

What makes City of Widows so powerful is that Hashimi refuses to reduce her characters to victims. The novel is occasionally terrifying and, at times, almost unbearable, because one cannot forget that the stakes are real and high.

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Hashimi has taken a break from clinical medicine to write full-time. “Both my husband and I feel that these stories create some legacy, that there’s an empty space on the shelves for Afghan stories,” she said. “These are the stories that I would have wanted to read when I was young.”

She hopes that the novel will evoke outrage. “That there will be a degree of respect and recognition for the women who are fighting for themselves and have always been,” she said. “That there will be a bit of outrage over what is happening. That we are allowing this to happen, this egregious violation of human rights and the state of gender apartheid that is being created.”

City of Widows is not a light read and, at the end of the day, is a reminder that the women of Afghanistan are not voiceless. The world has, unfortunately, simply turned a deaf ear.

Aishwarya Khosla

Aishwarya Khosla spearheads the digital strategy and execution for the Read More