The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul: The heart-warming and uplifting international bestseller

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BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. On a visit to the Women’s Mission, Sunny overhears Yazmina’s story and realising something about her, offers her a room and work in the cafe to help keep her safe.

I was looking for something to read yesterday and decided it was finally time to give this one a go. Kat, Sunny's friend from America, is wrapping up her year-long stay in the land of her birth, but is facing some unfinished business.Hopefully once things are back to some kind of normality, you’ll be able to get out and see people a bit more. Having read a number of fiction books about Afghanistan (A Thousand Splendid Suns being my favourite) I was keen to read this book following five women in Kabul.

There is a small pen marking from a previous owner on the inside front page, otherwise no other pre-loved markings. Yet there were a few things that bothered me, one of which was the love triangle between Sunny and the two main men in her life. The characters are fabulous, every one comes to life off the page and you can see each one clearly in your mind. Interwoven into their stories are a multitude of other, mostly male characters, who impact the women in a variety of different ways.The other main characters are; Halajan, a widowed older woman who owns the building and privately rails against the conservative regime and hankers after the liberal years of her youth, pre-Taliban, so she can publicly have a relationship with the man she has always loved; Ahmet, Halajan's conservative son who, in spite of himself, falls in love with Yazmina; Candace, a brash American who has left her husband for a mysterious wealthy Afghan who runs a school for orphans and wants her money for his cause; Isabel, a British journalist; and Jack, an American security expert who, quite obviously, has feelings for Sunny.

If you answer no at any time, drop this book immediately and find a clerk to direct you to nonfiction or action/adventure books. About the author: Rodriguez taught at and later directed the first modern beauty academy and training salon in Afghanistan. These chikidor are competing with another, she thought, like the schoolgirls back home with their cellphones, handbags and jewelry. However, the author's interwoven plot adds to the reader's insight into the harsh reality of the Afghans' daily living in light of the threat of Taliban aggression.Yasmina, the young mother who now runs the cafe, until a terrifying event strikes at the heart of her family and business. Deborah’s years of living in Afghanistan herself has provided her with a perceptive eye which added to the story, her experiences there leak through into this story giving us a clearer picture of what Afghanistan is really like. It does attempt to have an interesting storyline, an exotic but gritty setting and female characters who are not obsessed with shoes and brand names. I was really interested in how ‘Western’ women would cope living in a country with very different laws, traditions and protocols, some of which are very restrictive. I have read other books about Afghanistan, written by literary men, but this one is not an intellectual, meta-fictional product.

But Rodriguez sets the scene for the reader, detailing their culture and social expectations and evocatively illustrating a city where life is lived on a knife-edge. Yazmina now runs a pair of women's shelters from the old cafe, and dreams of a bright future for her two young daughters. But there are also other characters I honestly didn’t care for too much and felt that this book perhaps didn’t address in depth enough or explain enough why something was happening. I cannot reconcile my personal reactions to the dreadful horrors of being a female in Afghanistan and the author's 'Pollyanna' view of ordinary Afghan life (despite an on-going war, episodic as it appears to be). The thread about frustration with corruption lost its power when she herself used bribes and connections and broke laws herself- working the corrupt system.It is a very easy read and the author, Deborah Rodriguez, has lived and run a cafe in Kabul herself so you can have some confidence that she probably knows what she is writing about. Read this if you like stories about how love changes people and be grateful for where you are, especially the X chromosome. Rashif and Halajan have been in love since young children, but had marriages arranged to other people. If you fail to comply with this obligation, we may have a right of action against you for compensation. Deborah Rodriguez is a hairdresser, a motivational speaker, and the author of the bestselling memoir Kabul Beauty School.