Amir, a forty-year-old novelist living in the U.S., returns to his native Afghanistan to right a terrible wrong that ended his boyhood friendship with Hassan, a member of the persecuted Hazara people.

In 2009, the CIA's Kabul Station fell for a source who promised to lead it to Bin Laden, but instead he blew himself up, taking the station's most senior officers with him. Now, more than two years later, the station is still floundering, agents are dying, and at Langley the CIA's chiefs wonder if the unthinkable has happened, if somehow the Taliban has infiltrated the station. When they ask John Wells to investigate, he reluctantly agrees to return...

A widowed grandmother, mother, and daughter are facing starvation. Since the foreign doctors have been driven away, the mother's employment at the hospital ends. Thus the young daughter, at the risk of being discovered and killed, masquerades as a boy in order to earn money--a necessity since they cannot leave the house without a male escort. Snatched away from her job and sent to be indoctrinated by the Taliban, it is just a matter of time before...