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

5 min readAfghanistanUpdated: Jul 31, 2026 06:03 PM IST Nadia Hashimi’s new novel, City of Widows, is a sequel to her debut, The Pearl That Broke Its Shell (2014). 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 Afgha