We Are Still Here: Afghan Women on Courage, Freedom, and the Fight to Be Heard
By Nahid Shahalimi (Editor), Margaret Atwood (Foreword)
In We Are Still Here, artist and activist Nahid Shahalimi compiles the voices of 13 powerful, insightful, and influential Afghan women who have worked as politicians, journalists, scientists, filmmakers, artists, coders, musicians, and more. As they reflect on their country’s past, stories of their own upbringing and the ways they have been able to empower girls and women over the past two decades emerge.
The Favored Daughter: One Woman’s Fight to Lead Afghanistan into the Future
By Fawzia Koofi
Born in a rural village, Fawzia Koofi is a former Vice President of the Afghan National Assembly and the first woman elected as Second Deputy Speaker of Parliament, where she chaired the Women Affairs, Civil Society, and Human Rights Commission. In recognition of her advocacy, she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. But when the United States left Afghanistan, that all changed. From 2021 onward she has lived in exile in London, continuing her global fight for women’s rights and education in Afghanistan.
By Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
The life Kamila Sidiqi had known changed overnight when the Taliban seized control of the city of Kabul. After receiving a teaching degree during the civil war—a rare achievement for any Afghan woman—Kamila was subsequently banned from school and confined to her home. When her father and brother were forced to flee the city, Kamila became the sole breadwinner for her five siblings. Armed only with grit and determination, she picked up a needle and thread and created a thriving business of her own.
The Dressmaker of Khair Khana tells the incredible true story of this unlikely entrepreneur who mobilized her community under the Taliban. Former ABC Newsreporter Gayle Tzemach Lemmon spent years on the ground reporting Kamila’s story, and the result is an unusually intimate and unsanitized look at the daily lives of women in Afghanistan. These women are not victims; they are the glue that holds families together; they are the backbone and the heart of their nation.
The Finest Hotel in Kabul: People’s History of Afghanistan
By Lyse Doucet
The story of a hotel. The story of a nation. When the Inter-Continental Kabul opened in 1969, Afghanistan’s first luxury hotel symbolized a dream of a modernizing country connected to the world. More than fifty years on, the Inter-Continental is still standing. It has endured Soviet occupation, multiple coups, a grievous civil war, a US invasion and the rise, fall and rise of the Taliban. Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent, has been checking into the Inter-Continental since 1988. And here, she uses its story to craft a richly immersive history of modern Afghanistan.
Winner of Barnes & Noble’s 2026 Women’s Prize for Nonprofit.
Last to Eat, Last to Learn: My Life in Afghanistan Fighting to Educate Women
By Pashtana Durrani
Pashtana was raised in an Afghan refugee camp in Pakistan where her father, a tribal leader, founded a community school for girls within their home. Fueled by his insistence that despite being a girl, she mattered and deserved an education, Pashtana was sixteen when, against impossible odds, she was granted a path out of the refugee camp: admittance to a preparatory program at Oxford. Unthinkably and to her parents’ horror, she chose a different path. She chose Afghanistan.
Pashtana founded the nonprofit LEARN and developed a program for getting educational materials directly into the hands of girls in remote areas of the country, training teachers in digital literacy. Her commitment to education has made her a target of the Taliban. Still, she continues to fight for women’s education and autonomy in Afghanistan and beyond.
See our 2024 Together Women Rise Book Club event to hear Pashtana talk about her book.
Dancing in the Mosque: An Afghan Mother’s Letter to Her Son
By Homeira Qaderi
In the days before Homeira Qaderi gave birth to her son, Siawash, the road to the hospital in Kabul would often be barricaded because of the frequent suicide explosions. With the city and the military on edge, it was not uncommon for an armed soldier to point his gun at the pregnant woman’s bulging stomach, terrified that she was hiding a bomb. Frightened and in pain, she was once forced to make her way on foot. Propelled by the love she held for her soon-to-be-born child, Homeira walked through blood and wreckage to reach the hospital doors. But the joy of her beautiful son’s birth was soon overshadowed by other dangers that would threaten her life. An exquisite and inspiring memoir about one mother’s unimaginable choice in the face of oppression and abuse in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
My Beautiful Sisters: A Memoir of Courage, Hope, and the Afghan Women’s Soccer Team
Khalida Popal
Khalida Popal first discovered soccer as a child in a refugee camp after her family fled Taliban rule. She went on to co-found and captain the Afghan women’s national soccer team, using sports to empower girls and challenge deeply rooted gender barriers despite facing constant threats and eventually being forced into exile. When the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan in 2021, Popal mobilized an international network to help evacuate more than 350 female soccer players whose lives were at risk simply for playing the game they loved. Her memoir is a powerful story of courage, sisterhood, resilience, and the fight for women’s freedom in the face of extraordinary danger.
By Amy Waldman
Amy Waldman reported from Afghanistan for The New York Times after 9/11. Her novel presents the journey of an Afghan-American college student who is inspired to travel to a rural Afghan village to volunteer with a maternal health clinic. But her idealism clashes with the reality of life in rural Afghanistan, and she becomes caught up in the insecurity of women’s day-to-day lives.
The Pearl That Broke Its Shell
Nadia Hashimi
This novel is set in Kabul in 2007 and revolves around the impacts of gender inequality in Afghanistan. It intertwines the stories of Rahima, a 13-year old child bride, and her great great great grandmother, Shekiba, a hundred years before her. Because their mothers did not have sons, both girls were offered the ancient custom of bacha posh, which allows young Rahima to dress and be treated as a boy until she is of marriageable age. As a son, she can attend school, go to the market, and chaperone her older sisters. But soon, Rahima must take up her life as a bride and her decisions are mirrored by the ones made by Shekiba a hundred years earlier.
See our 2022 Together Women Rise Book Club event to hear Nadia Hashimi talk about her book.
By Khaled Hosseini
The book, which spans a period of over 40 years, from the 1960s to 2003, focuses on the tumultuous lives and relationship of Mariam and Laila, two Afghan women. Mariam, an illegitimate child, suffers from the stigma surrounding her birth and the abuse she faces throughout her marriage. Laila, born a generation later, is comparatively privileged during her youth until their lives intersect and she is also forced to accept a marriage proposal from Rasheed, Mariam’s husband.
By Mandana Hendessi
This is a tale of courage, resistance and survival that lingers beyond the final page. It is about a group of women prisoners who risk everything to expose a network of abuse and corruption that reaches the highest levels of power in Afghanistan. Unlike many novels set in Afghanistan, which often focus on war, foreign intervention and women as passive victims, The Almond Garden of Kabul brings to light untold stories from a hidden world, where survival is a battle of wits, resilience and defiance. Rather than centring on external conflicts, it exposes systemic corruption, state-sponsored abuse, and the high-stakes risks of uncovering the truth from within.
Razia’s Ray of Hope: One Girl’s Dream of an Education
By Elizabeth Suneby
Razia dreams of getting an education, but in her small village in Afghanistan, girls haven’t been allowed to attend school for many years. When a new girls’ school opens in the village, a determined Razia must convince her father and oldest brother that educating her would be best for her, their family and their community. Razia’s Ray of Hope is based on the true stories of the students of the Zabuli Education Center for Girls just outside of Kabul, founded by a generous and resourceful woman named Razia Jan, a CNN hero, who also appears in the story.
Razia’s Ray of Hope is a former Together Women Rise grantee.
Nasreen’s Secret School: A True Story of Afghanistan
By Jeanette Winter
Young Nasreen has not spoken a word to anyone since her parents disappeared. In despair, her grandmother risks everything to enroll Nasreen in a secret school for girls. Will a devoted teacher, a new friend, and the worlds she discovers in books be enough to draw Nasreen out of her shell of sadness?
Based on a true story from Afghanistan, this inspiring book will touch readers deeply as it affirms both the life-changing power of education and the healing power of love.
By Bahram Rahman
It is still dark in Kabul, Afghanistan when the library bus rumbles out of the city. There are no bus seats—instead there are chairs and tables and shelves of books. And there are no passengers—instead there is Pari, who is nervously starting her first day as Mama’s library helper. Pari stands tall to hand out notebooks and pencils at the villages and the refugee camp, but she feels intimidated. The girls they visit are learning to write English from Mama. Pari can’t even read or write in Farsi yet. But next year she will go to school and learn all there is to know. And that is a wonderful thing. Not long ago, Mama tells her, girls were not allowed to read at all.