When I picked up Escape from Kabul I wasn’t expecting to be gripped so quickly. The setup, the chaos of August 2021 and the sudden, terrifying collapse of everything these women relied on, hits you straight away. It’s the kind of book that makes you hold your breath and keep turning pages, mostly because you want those women to get through whatever comes next.
What the book is about
The story follows five women who worked at the Anglo-American University of Kabul, Anjali, Nadia, Cathy, Zohra and Fawzia — as the Taliban rapidly take control of the city. The book stays close to their day-to-day: hiding, making impossible decisions, scrambling for documents, secret phone calls, and those long, dangerous attempts to reach safety. It’s not a grand geopolitical history; it’s the small, personal moments of fear and courage that make the situation feel real and urgent.
The characters and their bond
What stayed with me most was the sisterhood between the women. Each character is drawn with enough detail that you care about her choices, even if the book doesn’t dwell on every backstory. Their dependence on one another — practical and emotional — becomes the backbone of the narrative. Watching them argue, console each other, and take risks together made their survival feel like something earned, not just luck.
The writing and pace
The prose is spare but vivid — often tense and immediate. Scenes of panic and waiting are written in a way that made me feel the claustrophobia and the noise of the streets outside. The pacing matches the story: long, anxious waits broken by sharp, fast moments of action. There are no extravagant metaphors; the writing trusts the rawness of the situation to do the work.
Themes that hit home
Resilience and agency run through the whole book. These women’s choices — to flee, to hide, to trust someone or not — are presented as moral and practical acts of survival. The book also raises clear questions about identity, what it means to be educated or connected to international institutions in a place that suddenly rejects those ideas, and how fragile freedom can be.
What moved me most
There are small, quiet moments that tug at you more than the big escapes — a whispered plan in a kitchen, the way they keep each other distracted, a brief memory of normal life before everything changed. Those bits made the characters feel human and not just symbols of tragedy. I remember putting the book down several times because the scenes lingered with me.
Final words
Reading this felt important and urgent. It gave me a ground-level look at what happens to ordinary people — especially women — when institutions collapse and danger moves in fast. I finished it thinking about courage, the cost of escape, and how fragile the everyday things we take for granted really are. If you want a human story from that moment in Afghanistan — close, tense, and heartfelt — this book will stay with you.
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