The Finest Hotel in Kabul

The Finest Hotel in Kabul offers an unflinching and intimate portrait of contemporary Afghanistan, from the hopeful days following the fall of the Taliban’s first regime to the chilling return of fear under their second rule. At the heart of the story is a woman who prepares food with her hands, yet in doing so, is quietly shaping the future. As the Taliban return, laughter fades, and like thousands of other women, she is pushed to the margins. This book is a powerful historical account of lives lived in the crossfire of conflict and power, a story too rarely heard, and too often overlooked. Broken promises of peace for a people who have lived, generation after generation, in the shadow of war and politics.

ZAHRA JOYA, founder of Rukhshana Media

A story of a country and a people, told with knowledge, insight and tenderness. I’ve been waiting for a Lyse Doucet book for a long time and what she has produced here is testament to her humanity as well as her journalistic eye.

MISHAL HUSAIN, Sunday Times bestselling author of Broken Threads

An incredible book – vivid and beautifully written, it captures the soul of Afghanistan through an age of hopes and heartbreak, as well as one of constant change. A tender, wise and quietly devastating book.

PETER FRANKOPAN, author of The Silk Roads

As with the voice, so with the book: distinct, original, humane, powerful and utterly compelling.

PHILIPPE SANDS, author of East West Street

What a beautiful book – inventive, compassionate, witty, brilliantly structured. An extraordinary introduction to Afghanistan, and a tribute to one of the finest correspondents of our age.

RORY STEWART, author of Politics On the Edge and The Places in Between

An ingenious method of storytelling, and what a story the Inter-Continental Kabul has to tell. Lyse Doucet writes with verve and insight, and a clear warmth of feeling for Afghanistan and its people.

KAMILA SHAMSIE, author of Home Fire

The Finest Hotel in Kabul plays to all Lyse Doucet’s strengths. Clarity, empathy, depth of knowledge and innate grasp of fine detail. Her subject is not just a hotel, but a hotel that tells the story of four decades of Afghanistan’s proud and sometimes unbelievably painful history. This is a most readable account of joy, despair and resilience in one of the world’s most fascinating countries.

MICHAEL PALIN

Lyse Doucet is a consummate storyteller and first class journalist . . . A powerful and evocative account of a people who have borne tumultuous waves of progress and repression, from mini skirts and white weddings to burqas and gross Taliban denials of freedoms. A brilliant and important reminder of the cost of wars.

HELENA KENNEDY

A book brimming with deep insight, courage and conscience. Everyone should read this. Astonishingly beautiful, subtle and simply unforgettable.

ELIF SHAFAK, author of There Are Rivers in the Sky

The Finest Hotel in Kabul tells the story of Afghanistan through the Hotel Inter-Continental Kabul, a sexy splash of glamour in a poor, mostly illiterate country when it opened in 1969. Afghanistan was a kingdom then and in the years since, the hotel and its staff have seen coups, a Soviet invasion, a Marxist dictatorship, civil war, the Taliban, western invasion and occupation, the Taliban again. Doucet, the BBC’s chief international correspondent, does a terrific, novelistic job of telling the story of the people who’ve worked there and what this tumultuous change has meant for them.

ROBBIE MILLEN, The Times