Shadow City is no conventional travel book. For Khan gives us a Kabul of the imagination: it is the city that was, less the city that is, that fascinates her. Her perambulations represent a form of “bipedal archaeology”, an exercise in exhuming the past and probing the lost… It is easy to cast Kabul as a tragic mess of a metropolis, but Khan illuminates its life-affirming humanity

Offers a unique on-the-ground view of the city…a refreshing counterpoint to the macho foreign correspondent genre… Khan’s interviews during her walks powerfully evoke the fluctuating mood in a city that is trying to heal itself

These stories conjure a magic in the labyrinthine streets and reveal a fragile city in a state of flux, shape-shifting and flickering with the promise of peace

Any reader of this book is sure to discover a Kabul so unlike what the media portrays. Taran’s love of her city comes across in her enchanting evocation of a city where so many tragedies echo from across Kabul’s decades of war. On her last walk, she writes: “to leave Kabul was to take it with you.” This is what happened when I finished reading this book, I took Kabul with me

On the surface, Kabul is a city caught “between the hope of peace and the habit of violence.” The deeper reality, though, is even more complex and layered: like Kabul’s actual lanes, those that map its character “twist and vanish . . . like well-kept secrets.” It is an elusive, illusive place – bood, nabood, now you see it, now you don’t. Taran Khan’s achievement is to have caught it in an affecting and beautifully observed portrait, a word-map that will endure