No Space for Further Burials

“[Feryal] Ali Gauhar’s epistolary approach highlights not only the horrifying but also the withering monotony of prison life . . . it’s a haunting and important read, as the war continues eight years later, without more of an end-or sense-in sight.” —Jonathan Messinger, Time Out Chicago

“Profoundly touching . . . Feryal Ali Gauhar questions us and forces us to face our responsibilities as universal citizens. In a mirror effect, she makes us see the image of a world that has become its own tormentor.” —Yasmina Khadra, author of The Swallows of Kabu

Set in Afghanistan in late 2002, No Space for Further Burials is a chilling indictment of the madness of war and our collective complicity in the perpetuation of violence. The novel’s narrator, a US army medical technician in Afghanistan helping “liberate” the country from the Taliban, has been captured by rebels and thrown into an asylum. The other inmates are a besieged gathering of society’s forgotten and unwanted refugees and derelicts, disabled and different, resilient and maddened, struggling to survive the lunacy raging outside the asylum compound. The novel becomes a powerful evocation of the country’s desolate history of plunder and war, waged by insiders and outsiders, all fueled by ideology, desperation, and greed.

This astonishingly powerful story unfolds the tragedy of Afghanistan, as told by the captive narrator, in hauntingly beautiful prose. While the characters try to cope with their individual destinies, the terrible madness of war is counterpointed with the poignancy of their lives and the narrator’s own peculiar predicament—the “victor” now a victim, his ambivalence a metaphor for everything Afghanistan symbolizes.