Sparks Like Stars: A Novel

Sparks Like Stars is the fourth contemporary adult novel by Afghan American author Nadia Hashimi. Hashimi’s previous publications include two children’s books and the bestselling novels A House Without Windows (2016), When the Moon is Low (2015), and The Pearl that Broke its Shell (2014). A trained medical doctor, Hashimi was born in the US to Afghan parents who left Afghanistan in the 1970s. Like her previous novels, Sparks Like Stars focuses on the fate of an Afghan woman whose life is upended by political turmoil. It examines how tragedy affects the fate of a person and a nation.

Told in two parts, the novel begins in Kabul in 1978, when young Sitara Zamani watches her family die in the Saur Revolution and escapes with the help of a palace soldier and a pair of American women who smuggle her to the US under a new identity, Aryana. In the second part of the novel, set in 2008, Aryana is a medical doctor living in New York City, but when the soldier whom she believes killed her family shows up in her hospital, Aryana sets off on a quest to Afghanistan to unearth the buried past and find closure for the grief that has haunted her for 30 years.