Title: The King of Afghanistan Did Not Marry Us - Ingrid Thobois - book
Summary :
2007 French First Novel Prize
First Novel Award They say that true love is a journey... This enchanting debut novel recounts the end of one and the true beginning of the other. Carefully following the narrator's words, we visit Afghanistan, from Kabul to Jalalabad. An intimate Afghanistan, certainly scarred by war, but foreign to the representations provided to us by television news. The young woman arrived there shortly after the American intervention to give French lessons. She fell in love with another expatriate, older and married. If this affair has for her the taste of the new, its torments are the lot of all passions: erotic escapades, missing the other, thirst for the absolute, hope of one day living together, senseless promises, disillusionment and suffering. When the narrator finally succumbs to the charm of a violent but captivating land of exile, she frees herself from the charm of the man who has made her suffer a thousand deaths. It is with a disoriented soul that she sets out to meet inhabitants whose smile, word, or gesture engraves in her memory, and whose ethereal language engraves in ours.
