Silent Hearts: A Novel

by Gwen Florio

For fans of A Thousand Splendid Suns, “a rich, haunting, immersive story of cultures at the crossroads” (Jamie Ford, bestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet) that follows two women in Afghanistan—an American aid worker and her local interpreter—as they form an unexpected friendship despite their utterly different life experiences and the ever-increasing violence in Kabul. ​

In 2001, Kabul is a place of possibility as people fling off years of repressive Taliban rule. This hopeful chaos brings together American aid worker Liv Stoellner and Farida Basra, an educated Pakistani woman still adjusting to her arranged marriage to Gul, the son of an Afghan strongman whose family spent years of exile in Pakistan before returning to Kabul.

Both Liv and her husband take positions at an NGO that helps Afghan women recover from the Taliban years. They see the move as a reboot—Martin for his moribund academic career, Liv for their marriage. But for Farida and Gul, the move to Kabul is fraught, severing all ties with Farida’s family and her former world, and forcing Gul to confront a chapter in his life he’d desperately tried to erase.

The two women, brought together by Farida’s work as an interpreter, form a nascent friendship based on their growing mutual love for Afghanistan.

As the bond between Farida and Liv deepens, war-scarred Kabul acts in different ways upon them, as well as their husbands. Silent Hearts is “highly recommended, especially for fans of Khaled Hosseini” (Library Journal, starred review).

• ISBN10: 1501181947
• ISBN13: 9781501181948
• Publish Date: 24 July 2018
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Atria Books
• Format: eBook (EPUB)
• Pages: 336
• Language: English

Reviews

[kalventure]

This really wasn't the book for me but I cannot deny that Silent Hearts is beautifully written and incredibly powerful. This novel dive into post 9/11 Afghanistan through the different perspectives two couples (four people total) from very different cultures: Liv Stoellner is an American researcher that came to Kabul with her husband to work for an NGO to help women and Farida Basra is a Pakistani interpreter whose work Liv and the NGO heavily rely on... while she passes information about the Americans on to her husband and his father.

My heart felt for Farida from my first introduction to her: strong willed and intelligent, we learn that she brought some form of shame upon her while the family lived abroad in England that made it difficult to arrange marriage for her. She was content with her quiet life in Islamabad, but her father consented to marry her off to an uneducated and illiterate son of a Pashtun businessman. When she was "gifted" a burqa my heart hurt for her as she realized just how different her life truly would become with a strictly traditional family in the north (those her own father had called barbarians). Gul's father arranged the marriage of his son and Farida because of her family's connections with Americans as he was hoping to use them. And then 9/11 happened and they hurried across the border to Afghanistan, crossing thousands of miles by foot, because Gul's father wants to align with whomever wins the war: the Taliban or the Americans. Lovely.

I found myself essentially hating the men in this book, and everyone has secret agendas to hide. I wish that the book had more character development in it, because everyone but Farida (and Gul a little) felt one dimensional to me. I love it when books center on female friendships, and the one that Liv and Farida develop is deep yet I was left wanting much more in that regard. I did struggle in the first 20% of the book with the four point of views and jumping around time periods a bit; while I appreciated the Western perspective of the Americans alongside the traditional and slightly-less traditional Afghani/Pakistani perspectives, I think the narrative would have been better had it been focused on Liv and Farida only. While Gul and Martin's perspectives definitely provide the whole picture of what is going on, I think it could have been discovered easily enough by eavesdropping.

This was not the book for me. but I think that is largely because I generally struggle with contemporary adult fiction that largely centers on marriage (I may be in my 30s but my life experience is so different). I think this would be an excellent book for book clubs as the themes of marriage, power, politics, and the status of women lend themselves easily for discussion. Lovers of women's contemporary fiction will likely enjoy this touching and powerful story.

Many thanks to the publisher for providing me an electronic copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

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