cover image The Lovers: Afghanistan’s Romeo and Juliet, the True Story of How They Defied Their Families and Escaped an Honor Killing

The Lovers: Afghanistan’s Romeo and Juliet, the True Story of How They Defied Their Families and Escaped an Honor Killing

Rod Nordland. Ecco, $26.99 (336p) ISBN 978-0-06-237882-8

Norland, a New York Times correspondent, meticulously relates the tale of Ali and Zakia, who became Afghanistan’s most famous couple after marrying in 2013 without parental permission and thereby endangering their lives. In so doing, he opens a window onto their country’s fierce resistance to change, particularly regarding the status of women. Mohammad Ali and Zakia, whose fathers owned adjoining fields outside Bamiyan, a city in central Afghanistan, first met as children. They fell in love as teenagers, but his heritage as a Shiite and ethnic Hazara and hers as a Sunni and ethnic Tajik posed seemingly insurmountable barriers. In Nordland’s telling, the pair emerge as fully rounded characters even while serving as symbols of Afghan culture’s stifling restraints. From the couple’s initial elopement to their unexpected elevation to media prominence in 2014—due to the author’s reporting and a media-savvy New Jersey rabbi with connections to the Afghan Ministry of Women’s Affairs—Nordland’s storytelling remains gripping, with more than a hint of Shakespearean drama. The couple’s survival, in the face of familial and societal condemnation, provides a happy if incomplete resolution. Far less uplifting is Nordland’s reporting on the overall situation for women in Afghanistan, a country that Massouda Jalal, former Afghan minister for women’s affairs, calls “the worst place in the world to be a woman.” (Jan.)