Imagine that a jewel-like garden overlooking Kabul is your ancestral home. Imagine a kitchen made fragrant with saffron strands and cardamom pods simmering in an authentic pilau. Now remember that you were born in London, your family in exile, and that you have never seen Afghanistan in peacetime.

These are but the starting points of Saira Shahs memoir, by turns inevitably exotic and unavoidably heartbreaking, in which she explores her familys history in and out of Afghanistan. As an accomplished journalist and documentarianher film Beneath the Veil unflinchingly depicted for CNN viewers the humiliations forced on women under Taliban ruleShah returned to her familys homeland cloaked in the to witness the pungent and shocking realities of Afghan life. As the daughter of the Sufi fabulist Idries Shah, primed by a lifetime of listening to her fathers stories, she eagerly sought out, from the mouths of Afghan refugees in Pakistan, the rich and living myths that still sustain this battered culture of warriors. And she discovered that in Afghanistan all the storytellers have been menuntil now.