“Who knows? Maybe you and I will end up going back together,” I say, thinking of Waleed’s sister and the churning hospital. I’m surprised at how easily I talk about a future with Clay. Maybe that comes from having talked about so much of the past with him.

“Maybe. I’ve still got those stories to finish,” Clay says. He managed to squeeze one article out of his trip to Kabul, but it was hardly the piece his chief had expected.

“Are you sure you don’t want to write about . . .”

Clay shakes his head.

“That story is yours to tell, Aryana,” he says. “I just hope I can be the first to read it.”

I fill my lungs with the cool night air, the scent of evergreens and a distant fire. I wrap my arm around Clay’s waist, and my head spins to think of how fast and far we’ve traveled together. There is so much more I want to learn about him. There is so much more of me I want to share with him.

And for the first time in my life, that thought does not daunt me.

Author’s Note

A few years back, I pinned a newspaper article by journalist Carlotta Gall to the corkboard above my desk. It was a short piece on the discovery of the remains of Afghanistan’s first president, forty years after he and eighteen members of his family had been killed in a swift coup that forever changed the country’s course. The youngest victim was only eighteen months old.

My parents were born and raised in a peaceful window of Afghan history that came just before that coup. When they speak of their childhoods, they speak of crisp melons, stern teachers, kites and bicycles, the indulgent hugs of a grandmother, and poetry-filled nights. The photographs they carried into their lives as refugees and immigrants, the pictures I’ve seen throughout my life, would surprise people who have only gotten to know Afghanistan in the past twenty years.

My previous novels about Afghanistan span the last century, from the time of kings and harems to the suffocating grip of the Taliban to a fledgling democracy. Sparks Like Stars is my exploration of how a country that inspired wanderlust could have tipped into decades of war and turmoil. I see Afghanistan as a survivor, victimized by colonialism, imperialism, the Cold War, and, at times, by her own people.