A wry and witty narrative that's authoritative, affectionate, and at moments wonderfully absurd. With an eye for detail, and a profound sense of place, Nushin Arbabzadah's essays bring us deep inside a remarkable culture defined by its honour and humour. Afghanistan's story is best told by Afghans who live with all its incongruity and still leave us agreeing it's a ... Read morecountry like no other.
Lyse Doucet, Chief International Correspondent, BBC A fresh, funny, provocative voice. Arbabzadah's candid memories and comments are a timely reminder that Afghanistan is a country, not merely a conflict.
Jason Burke, author of On The Road to Kandahar: Travels Through Conflict in the Islamic World and The 9/11 Wars …invaluable and ground-breaking. For the first time, an Afghan, and a woman at that, takes Westerners into the world(s) of her countrymen and gives them an insider's guide to these people who are all too often cast in simplistic, one-dimensional terms.
Brian Glyn Williams, Central Asian Survey Part memoir, part journalism and part storytelling, the book is a heady ride into the craziness that is Afghan life ... [Arbabzadah's] deep affection for Afghanistan is as obvious as is her amusement about the absurdity of life there ... For a look into an often misunderstood country from a woman who is both an outsider and an insider, Afghan Rumour Bazaar is a must read.
Jyotsna Nambiar, PostNoon Nushin Arbabzadah's Afghanistan is a wonderful and terrible place, a land of heart-stopping beauty and unspeakable horrors ... The book is chaotic, and wonderfully so. Its great strength as a national portrait is that the jumble of anecdote and analysis, with serious scholarship and pithy observation and trivial detail all thrown in together, feels three-dimensional and complete.
Cordelia Jenkins, Mint Afghan Rumour Bazaar ... takes the reader deep into the Afghan culture ... The book offers an almost-irreverent, splendidly revealing take on Afghanistan.
The Telegraph (Calcutta) Afghan Rumour Bazaar by Cambridge scholar Nushin Arbabzadah is a brilliant narrative of the often-overlooked emerging threads and subcultures in Afghanistan.
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