RaveThe New Arab... stunning ... there is a breathless quality to Kochai’s writing as we are taken through large periods of history, but with enough signposting of violence that we can never detach these personal and historical moments from the impact they have on the human beings who live through them ... This, in essence, is one of the great successes of Kochai’s writing, the ability to inform of us of so much while expending very little effort in doing so ... evokes a ghostly resonance, but these spectral references are far from the occult, they are the living ghosts that are encoded into the limbs of those who have survived bombings attacks; they exist in the amygdala and hippocampus of the brain’s fear system, only resurfacing to re-experience past traumas once again ... Through his mystical stories, Jamil Jan Kochai manifests these ghosts of the past, ones that leave the reader breathless in their intensity, but also the ones that are important in reminding us of the world that has been left for Afghans, who continue to pay multitudes of penalties for their very existence.
