Recently, I took my two-year-old son, Ed, to a local bookstore so he could play with this Thomas the Tank Engine train set that he loves so much. As we made our way to the children’s section, my eye caught a glimpse of the cover of Kabul in Winter—a stark winter cityscape, gun-gray sky, snow-covered ground, and a lone figure of a woman in a burka holding an umbrella. I picked the book up and soon settled in to one of the miniature chairs in Train Land and started reading.

Kabul in Winter is a fierce and shocking look at a place that many have forgotten, the so-called liberated country of Afghanistan. It is a land haunted by the memory of the Taliban and still riddled with violence, especially against women. The author, journalist Ann Jones, takes us into the lives of the ostracized, the legless and the blind, a community of “runaway brides, pariah prostitutes, cast-off wives, victims of rape.” Yet, in all this starkness there is a sense of beauty, a willingness of the human spirit to survive and find meaning in meaninglessness.

Usually, I have to drag my son away from that train set, but that night we stayed for over an hour, him playing and me reading this shocking, angry, but profound book.

—Gary Jansen, Executive Editor, QPB