From bestselling novelist Nadia Hashimi—a gripping, occasionally terrifying, yet ultimately hopeful novel focusing on the women of Afghanistan in the years since the Taliban regained power.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from City of Widows by Nadia Hashimi, which releases on July 28th 2026.
In February 2020 the US began to withdraw troops from Afghanistan after nearly twenty years of occupation. A whole generation of Afghan women had been born during that time—women who had grown up in relative peace, gone to school, entered the professions, even served in the army and Parliament. The women of Afghanistan watched as the Taliban filled the streets again. They knew everything was about to change.
In the bustling, cosmopolitan city of Kabul, women are TV newscasters, shop owners, doctors, teachers, lawyers, even soldiers. They include Marjan, who fought with the Afghan army, and will risk everything to keep her daughter Hawa safe. In her earlier days Marjan was called Rahima and had lived the life of a bacha posh—a girl raised as a boy until she came of age. Forced into an early marriage, Rahima took the name Marjan when she fled her warlord husband. She’s created a whole new life for herself, one she will not give up easily.
So has Soraya, who defiantly wore red lipstick as she led the army’s all-female combat force over the objections of her upper-class family. Soraya’s now a wanted woman whose brother may choose not to shelter her from the Taliban. What will become of her? Or Mina, a journalist and broadcaster whose beautiful face is known to everyone in Kabul—including the new regime?
Fight or flight? Or find a third way? One thing is for certain: none of these women will meekly accept her fate.
An epic saga of fear, resistance, change, and reinvention, City of Widows gives voices to the unforgettable Afghan women at a crossroads of history.
“Marjan,” Kobra says slowly, suspending her name in the taut air. “You have not been honest with me.”
There are a dozen eyes on Marjan, who instinctively takes a half step to the right, closing the gap between her and her daughter. She takes Hawa’s hand, gives a gentle squeeze to the thin fingers. Hawa doesn’t withdraw or resist, her fire tempered by this freshly unveiled peril in the sweltering heat of summer. It is the season of stone fruit, a hard pit in every belly.
The women have crammed themselves into this room, their numbers doubled by the shadows cast on the clay walls. They are here to bear witness. They are here to ensure their safety. They are here to gawk. Even the tightly swaddled infant holds her cries, waits on Marjan’s reply.
Marjan tries to think quickly but she cannot find her thoughts, as if it is twilight in her mind as well. She needs only to choose one of the variations of her story that she has told in the past, but this is no easy feat. She has written, erased, and rewritten her story so many times that she has worn through the paper and vanished her own history. What had she told these women the first day she had climbed this hidden hill? She wishes she could ask one of the women in the room. Surely, one of them remembers.
“She should leave,” someone says, a voice shaky with nerves. A murmur ripples through the room. Marjan feels the familiar sting of rejection. She’s spent most of her life as an outcast. She reminds herself that she is a stranger to these women, a trespasser. She reminds herself that cornered mothers are dangerous creatures.
Something flutters in her belly, the anticipation of a fall. She feels as if she is high in the inky skies, readying herself to descend from a hovering helicopter with her freshly oiled firearm. On those nights, just before she put her hands on the rope, she always became acutely aware of her limbs, her head, her spine, her hammering heart, as if she were taking inventory of everything that could be lost if she wasn’t smart, if she didn’t remain vigilant. To the women in this room, she appears whole, but she is not. She will spend a lifetime grieving what she has lost because she chose to become a soldier.
The lights of the distant city flicker behind Kobra, like embers in the remains of a fire. The hill offers a unique view of the city, which has gone quiet these days; police trucks roll through the streets, driven by men who have their own laws, their own vision of order. People watch from behind curtained windows, some old enough to remember the last time they lived through this. Their heads bow, their shoulders slump. Their bodies recall the posture of submission needed to evade lashings.
“We have to think of our children,” says another woman, and the dim room fills with the hum of agreement. “Especially our daughters.”
“She is right,” affirms another.
Marjan cannot remain silent. Recalling her training, she softens her voice.
“Please. I’m also thinking of my daughter. If we are found . . .” Marjan glances at Hawa, an instinctive gesture. She despises herself immediately for using her daughter to tenderize this clutch of women.
Hawa stiffens. She is reminded of the piteous looks she would get at the music school from the parents who had never sent their children to live in an orphanage. She has never, ever wanted to be regarded as a mascot for misfortune, and her mother knows this. Hawa also knows her mother has never sounded so desperate.
“She is not one of us,” a woman cries out, looking right and left at the widows of her community. “Our hill has been quiet for years, but our peace has not come easy, nor has it come cheap. I have three children to look after. The last thing I need is a reason for those brutes to climb up here and poke their filthy heads into my home. Do you think they will look past my daughter? A fifteen-year-old girl? Beware, ladies! Beware!”
A teenage girl lingers behind her mother, arms folded across her chest. Other mothers have similar fears. They know how easy it is to bring down clay walls. They sleep lightly. What if their children are sent to the families of their fathers? Will their boys be pulled into those trucks? Will they soon have weapons thrust into their hands?
Her face obscured by the dark, a woman begins to sob.
Kobra pulls her shoulders back and the ends of her headscarf, minty dots on a tawny fabric, skirt her hips. The lines on her face are more severe than they should be at thirty-five. She raises a finger; the henna-stained tip acts as a red light and halts the chatter. She has no officially designated authority here, no title or honorific, though her mother founded this small society and she has lived here most of her life. She has muddied her hands erecting walls and she has shared food. She has faced down corrupt police officers and settled quarrels. She has listened. The wealth of respect she holds is hard-earned, not an inheritance.
“I want to hear from Marjan,” Kobra says. The room awaits Marjan’s reply.
In her lifetime, Marjan has been on both ends of an interrogation. She knows she is on the wrong side of the questions now. She closes her eyes, tries to hear the instructive voice that has guided her in her worst moments. When she was trapped in a forced marriage. When she spotted movement in the corner of her night-vision goggles. When she wasn’t sure she could face another sunrise.
Where is that voice now?
Someone huffs, angry but not enough to violate Kobra’s call for silence. Marjan thinks of the climb to reach this city within a city, with its eroding steps and patched walls. Stepping into this place was like stepping into a gritty but mythical land. Marjan has been in spaces without men—a women’s shelter, women’s barracks, a maternity hospital. But those were stops on a journey, not a place a woman could call home. Marjan can al-most see her neighborhood from the top of this hill. Are the birds perched on her balcony now? Are they looking at everything Marjan left behind? A tea kettle and sheets of music, a battered rug and a bar of lavender soap. These trinkets have swollen with value from the moment Marjan and Hawa left them all behind and fled to this scabrous hill.
Were it not for that one whisper in the wind, she would never have known this world existed, this world apart from men, this city of widows.
“Have you no answer?” Kobra asks.
“I will tell you why we’re here,” Hawa says.
Kobra raises an eyebrow. The women are still as a winter lake. From the beginning of time, people have sought refuge in the deep folds of a story, tragedy and triumph interwoven. We seek the hand-knitted comfort of a tale, particularly one steeped in the epic suffering of innocents, to hear of others who have been cheated by fate and tricked by friends and pierced by love’s sharp arrow. The women lean in; the coven tightens. These widows are anxious, certainly. But they’re also intrigued.
“Hawa!” Marjan protests. Their story was unwieldy even when she alone was the storyteller. What if Hawa gets it wrong? What if she reveals one detail too many?
Hawa looks unsurprised and unimpressed by her mother’s reaction. They know each other as mothers and daughters do—all too well and not at all. Marjan thinks of the times she was silenced as a girl, all the decisions made for her.
At the bottom of the hill, the streets are crawling with vengeful men, patrolling and purifying a stolen city. Will they silence the women again? And if Marjan silences Hawa now, what will she have taught her daughter? Like everyone else in the room, Marjan’s eyes are trained on Hawa, her daughter’s youth marred by the shadows under her eyes. There has been no rest since the Taliban stormed into Kabul.
Marjan is reminded that their story is not exclusively hers and has not been since the day Hawa was born. She looks at her daughter and wilts, realizing that she will now yield their heavy history and their bleak fate to this young girl. She wants to scream, ashamed of the cruel inheritance she has bestowed upon her child. Marjan has endured much abuse and loss in this life, violence in all its many forms. But the humiliation burning through her body right now feels like a conspiracy of a higher order. She feels her faith slipping like water through cupped hands.
Hawa sees her mother’s face flush crimson, her lip tremble. She wants to reach out and steady her, but she’s also afraid to touch her mother, like the heat in her might sear Hawa’s fingertips. She feels as if the world, her world, is only now coming into focus. Her senses sharpen. When there is more time, she will wonder if she has missed tendrils of smoke and movement in the shadows and dark clouds. She lets her gaze float from her mother to Kobra, to the thin lines on her face and the hard set of her jaw. She understands now that every leap and step and stumble she has taken in her life thus far has steered her to this place, to this moment, and to these words.
“My mother has made a lot of enemies in her life,” Hawa says, her voice quavering like the song of an injured starling. “But I’m the reason we are in danger.”
