The Sleeping Buddha - Hamida Ghafour

An evocative family memoir and unique portrait of Afghanistan from a young Afghan journalist. Hamida Ghafour's family fled Kabul after the Russian invasion. In 2003 she was sent back by the Telegraph to cover the country's reconstruction. She finds a place changed utterly from the world her parents had described and her grandmother - an Afghan Virginia Woolf - had written about. All around her is the West's first post-9/11 experiment with an Islamic democracy. But the people she meets reveal a different kind of nation building: the 'beautician without borders' whose school teaches women a new kind of independence; her cousin's determined parliamentary campaign; the archaeologist digging for his country's lost civilisation in the form of a giant sleeping Buddha.