FEBRUARY 2019 - AudioFile
Ali Nasser creates a vivid vocal portrait of this unusual coming-of-age story. Marwand returns to Afghanistan and is completely disoriented by the country he last visited six years ago. We follow along as Marwand searches for the missing family guard dog, Budabash, who runs away after biting him. We are swept us along this 12-year-old's search for meaning by Nasser's tender treatment of postwar Kabul. His accurate pronunciation of names and foreign words lets listeners sink deeper into the story and the setting. Marwand is a memorable character made more so by the gentle rhythm between description and dialogue. This enjoyable listening experience is easy on the ears and heart. M.R. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
10/22/2018
Kochai’s debut is an imaginative, enthralling, and lyrical exploration of coming home—and coming-of-age—set amid the political tensions of modern Afghanistan. Twelve-year-old Marwand returns to his family’s village of Logar in 2005—and on the very first day, has the tip of his index finger bitten off by the compound’s fearsome guard dog, Budabash. Marwand, with his cousin, two “little uncles,” and younger brother, then vow “jihad against Budabash”—as soon as they can find the runaway hound. The seemingly Huck Finn–like tale, however, slowly evolves into a mesmerizing collection of stories, first narrated by Marwand (who recounts the vicious beating he gave an old mutt when the family first settled in Afghanistan in 1999) and set against the backdrop of a war-torn region. Through nightly conversations in the family compound, Marwand discovers that talk “always seemed to circle back to war.” His 99-day-long search for the devil dog Budabash is filled with the stories of events both real and imagined: a family wedding, a mysterious illness that takes down the household, and finally the dreamlike clash between Marwand and Budabash. Kochai is a masterful storyteller, and will leave readers eager for the next tale. (Jan.)
From the Publisher
A Southern Living Best New Book Coming Out Winter 2019
A TIME Best New Book to Read in January 2019
A Buzzfeed Book Coming In 2019 That You'll Want To Keep On Your Radar
A Vulture Best New Book You Should Read This January
Shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature
“99 Nights in Logar is crafted with care, respect and a hard-earned and profound understanding of its readership. It is funny, razor-sharp and full of juicy tales that feel urgent and illicit, turning the reader into a lucky, trilingual fly on the wall in a family loaded with secrets and prone to acquiring more. . . . The ensuing adventure is witty and engaging, somewhat allegorical, thrumming with histories of foreign wars and with memories of lives lost and childhoods cut short. . . . The author has created a singular, resonant voice, an American teenager raised by Old World Afghan storytellers. . . . Kochai has created an exciting and true voice.”
—New York Times Book Review
“A funny, lightly surreal evocation of life in rural Afghanistan . . . driven by a profusion of tales within tales, which begin and break off, resume and recur, swerve or blossom into one another. . . . The magical elements don’t seem so much more far-fetched than the drones in the sky, and the book’s comic register turns out to be wildly elastic . . . help[ing to] restore a sense of the weight and substance of individual Afghan lives for readers so inured to the large numbers of reported deaths over many years.”
—Harper's Magazine
“Kochai weaves together a tapestry of stories to present a captivating image of the country that has been called ‘the graveyard of empires.’ . . . [He] maintains a playful humor in Marwand’s voice, channeling something like One Thousand and One Nights meets The Sandlot, and we feel as if we are watching the coming-of-age of a real boy. . . . A bulwark against exoticism that reminds us that if we can treat stories with respect, we have a better chance of respecting the lives those stories serve.”
—TIME
“[For] lovers of literary fiction . . . Filled with adventure and seen through the eyes of twelve-year-old Marwand, Jamil Jan Kochai’s 99 Nights in Logar follows the young boy’s journey across present-day Afghanistan in search of Budabash, the family dog that has escaped.”
—Southern Living
“A story full of humor and heart.”
—Buzzfeed
“The use of embedded stories gestures to a tradition of oral storytelling. Even more satisfying is the novel’s attention to the textures of Afghan family life and to the ways that the boys integrate their American and Afghan identities—thrilling to American movies but also praying and holding hands in male friendship.”
—The New Yorker
“A warm but appropriately rough-edged picaresque about war-torn Afghanistan. . . . Kochai balances whimsy and dread, innocence and experience, and Marwand becomes a modern-day Huck Finn.”
—Vulture
“It’s something more than well crafted; it’s phenomenal. . . . But this is more than a coming-of-age novel. It delves into Afghanistan’s past by retelling its stories, as Marwand’s adventures are punctuated by the tales that extended families tell each other. There are stories branching out of stories. . . . Many of these stories are breathtaking. Some are as scary as waiting for a bomb to fall, or for a lost son to return; others are as tender as a little flower that survives the Daisy Cutters. . . . Kochai’s book has a big heart.”
—Mohammed Hanif, The Guardian
“[A] charming, energetic debut . . . A narrative style fizzing with surprise. [Kochai] swerves from slapstick silliness to magic realism and poignant reflection.”
—Anthony Cummins, The Guardian
“Ferocious, funny, rude, and freewheeling, 99 Nights in Logar is an insider’s portrait of modern Afghanistan—written with deep affection and zero piety. A brilliant and stylish debut.”
—Karan Mahajan, author of The Association of Small Bombs
“Imagine a twelve-year-old Don Quixote traversing a world full of absurdities and tragedies. Imagine The Arabian Nights set with America overshadowing an ancient landscape. 99 Nights in Logar is hilariously sad and heartbreakingly funny. Jamil Jan Kochai, a thrilling new writer, achieves in this book that rare quality of a storyteller both ageless and contemporary.”
—Yiyun Li, author of Kinder Than Solitude
“99 Nights in Logar is a revelation, in every sense of the word. An intimate look at childhood, at an Afghan province, at people and places as they deserve to be known, in all their complications. This is a novel that mourns all that has been lost, and chases after what might still be recovered. A romp, a poem, a prayer, a song of childhood—like youth itself, the writing is all energy, adventure, and possibility. Jamil Kochai is an astoundingly talented writer, listen up.”
—Justin Torres, author of We the Animals
“As alive to the present as to the past, Jamil Jan Kochai has crafted a first novel of tremendous promise. 99 Nights in Logar unfolds with complexity and inventiveness, revealing the many ways each generation must contend with the decisions of the generations before. An auspicious debut that captures with great urgency what awaits the generation coming of age now.”
—Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew
“An imaginative, enthralling, and lyrical exploration of coming home—and coming-of-age—set amid the political tensions of modern Afghanistan. . . . Kochai is a masterful storyteller.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Kochai captures the joys and the sorrows of life in Afghanistan, offering readers a glimpse into everyday life in a country whose people have grown so used to constant bombardment that they can differentiate between various types of IEDs by sound alone.”
—Booklist
“With beautiful prose that encompasses the brutality of life in Afghanistan without overshadowing the warmth of family, culture, and storytelling, Kochai delivers a gorgeous and kaleidoscopic portrait of a land we're used to seeing through a single, insufficient lens: the war on terror. A vivid and moving novel about heritage, history, and the family bonds that transcend culture.”
—Kirkus (starred review)
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2018-11-26
An absorbing portrait of life in contemporary Afghanistan that is simultaneously raucous and heart-rending, told from a perspective we rarely hear: that of a young émigré returning home to his war-torn country.
In his debut novel, Kochai tells the story of Marwand, a 12-year-old whose family has returned to their home province of Logar, just south of American-occupied Kabul, at the height of the war on terror. Marwand hasn't been to his ancestral home since he was 6; he's an American boy who barely knows life in Logar. Worse, the landscape feels like anything but home: American bases and checkpoints pockmark the land as the central government in Kabul tries to tamp down a raging insurgency, and Taliban fighters roam Logar with impunity. Holed up in his mother's family compound and looking for some comfort, Marwand tries to pet the family dog, Budabash—only to find the wolflike animal less agreeable than the dogs he's used to in America. Budabash bites off a bit of his finger and runs away. Convinced that Budabash is a demon in disguise, Marwand sets out with a band of cousins to track the dog down and bring him back home. But that plot is really just an excuse for an extravagant outpouring of storytelling: Marwand encounters an enormous cast of aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents, all of whom have stories to tell about their family and the bloody history of the land they call home. The result is a novel that reads like a thrilling collision of Huckleberry Finn, Boccacio's The Decameron, and One Thousand and One Nights. As it careens between tragic stories of Afghanistan's history of perpetual warfare and magical realist tales of djinn, the novel threatens to become unwieldy at times, but Marwand is the thread that holds it together. Endowed with a voice that is at once street-smart and innocent, the boy speaks a language that is distinctly Afghan but retains the marks of his life as an American preteen. When his little brother, Gwora, demands to follow Marwand and his cousins on their quest to find Budabash, Marwand beats him into submission: "After the whupping, I left him in the orchard all crumpled up," he boasts, "...while me and the rest of the fellahs headed out onto the roads of Logar to search all day long for the wolf-dog who, just a few weeks ago, had bitten the tip off my index finger." Marwand's is the voice of an American kid who speaks a bit of Pakhto and whose favorite word happens to be "Wallah!" When Marwand and his cousins hide on top of a roof of the compound to eavesdrop on a conversation or don burqas so they can sneak into a bride's wedding party in search of a cousin's betrothed, the book seems like the very echo of Huckleberry Finn. With beautiful prose that encompasses the brutality of life in Afghanistan without overshadowing the warmth of family, culture, and storytelling, Kochai delivers a gorgeous and kaleidoscopic portrait of a land we're used to seeing through a single, insufficient lens: the war on terror.
A vivid and moving novel about heritage, history, and the family bonds that transcend culture.
