A FORT OF NINE TOWERS (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2013) by Qais Akbar Omar (Fiction 2014) has received praise from media outlets all over the country since its release in April and was named an Amazon “Best Book of the Month.” We could not be more proud of Qais.
Here are just a handful of the reviews:
The Economist, in an interview with the author, calls A FORT OF NINE TOWERS “a poetic, funny and terrifying memoir of life in Kabul between the Soviet Army’s exit and the Taliban’s retreat.”
His publisher writes:
“One of the rare memoirs of Afghanistan to have been written by an Afghan, A Fort of Nine Towers reveals the richness and suffering of life in a country whose history has become deeply entwined with our own.”
Qais Akbar Omar manages his family’s carpet business in Kabul and writes books. In 2007, he was a visiting scholar at the University of Colorado. He has studied business at Brandeis University and is currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing at Boston University. Omar has lectured on Afghan carpets in Afghanistan, Europe, and the United States. He is the coauthor, with Stephen Landrigan, of Shakespeare in Kabul.
Photo credit Jason Burke