Revenge

The novel examines the dark logic of payback and the difficulty in stopping the cycle of act and react that defines what the novel sees as the dead-end of perpetual revenge. The attacks on New York and Washington generated a national outcry that demand some sort of payback, some revenge that would, in effect, even the score. Twenty years later, revenge still sustains the endless cycles of violence that haunt the Afghan people. As Reshmina, who comes to see that revenge is a poor motivator and leads only to more drastic and deadlier consequences, tries to explain to her brother, who sees his allegiance to the Taliban as revenge for his sister’s death at the hands of the American occupation, “In Pasto, that revenge was called badal, and it never ran out. Reshmina could wait a dozen years—a thousand—and still take her revenge...