While Aryana, her family, Rostam, Neelab, Antonia, and Tilly are my own creation, many characters, details, and events in this story are factual. President Daoud Khan did drive around Kabul in a white Toyota Corolla. The Americans stationed in cosmopolitan Kabul did indeed put on a performance of the musical Oklahoma! around the time of the Saur Revolution. Before the coup, Afghanistan had been a desirable and exotic posting that promised good times for diplomats. I took liberties with the timing of the siege on the American embassy in Islamabad, shortening the time between the assassination of Afghanistan’s president and the bubbling of anti-American tensions in neighboring Pakistan.

Afghans in the countryside were hospitable toward and likely intrigued by overlanders as well as bright-eyed Peace Corps volunteers from the sixties and seventies who still consider themselves “Friends of Afghanistan.” They are some of the most inspiring people I’ve ever met and their Afghan students, people like my father, remember time spent with these Americans fondly.

My portrayal of President Daoud Khan and the coup itself was informed by many sources—friends and family, books like Tamim Ansary’s Games Without Rules, Louis Dupree’s Afghanistan, and the oral history collection maintained by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (ADST). I read the interviews given by Americans who served in Kabul during the time of the coup, including Ambassador Theodore Eliot, political counselors, and officers of various positions. I reached out to Louise Taylor, who served as Director of the American Cultural Center in Kabul at the time of the coup and she was most generous with her time and memories, indulging my questions and enriching my story. The CIA’s reading room also holds a trove of fascinating and carefully redacted documents and communications. Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars is a worthy read for those looking for an easier to follow record of the CIA’s contorted involvement in Afghanistan in the years prior to 9/11. President Daoud Khan’s grandson, a survivor of the coup, shared his firsthand account with the Dari-speaking world. Mujib Mashal, and many of his journalist colleagues, have gifted us with compelling glimpses of life in Afghanistan today.

The low ceiling for women in the American foreign service is well described by many women who served and available on the ADST website as well as in Alison Palmer’s memoir, Diplomat and Priest.

The Head East guidebook published in 1973 offered a wide range of travel tips to overlanders ranging from best post offices to cheap meals. My favorite section included a recommendation for travelers to wade through poppy fields dressed in a loin cloth to collect “pollen hash” that could then be pressed “against the warm sweating body of a fellow romantic field nymph or satyr.” It’s easy to lose an afternoon browsing posted photographs of hippies in eastern bazaars or picnicking with their packs to the Hindu Kush mountains.