Nadia Hashimi made waves last year with the release of her fiction debut, The Pearl That Broke Its Shell – “a luminous tale of two women, destiny, and identity in Afghanistan,” according to Kirkus Reviews. Hashimi’s parents emigrated from their native Afghanistan in the 1970s, but a lifelong fascination with her cultural heritage led her to pen The Pearl That Broke Its Shell. The crisscrossing narrative follows two Afghan women, one in the present the other in the recent past, living as bacha posh —young women disguised as young men, a true Afghan practice. Hashimi, a pediatrician by training, received accolades for this “lyrical, heartbreaking account of silence lives” and is hard at work on a follow up centered around the experiences of Afghan refugees in Europe.

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