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Who is she?' asks a voice. 'A foreigner,' someone answers. 'No, she's Afghan. Can't you tell?' 'She is not Afghan - she is writing.' A young boy of about ten sidles up to me and watches my notebook intently. He looks completely puzzled. He doesn't understand that a woman can write. The image of a woman holding a pen is far more alluring and powerful than anything the politicians here today have to say. The crowd grows and grows. Some laugh and point. I am conscious of my black scarf slipping from my head. Hamida Ghafour's family fled Afghanistan after the Russian invasion, when she was just a child. In 2003 she goes back as a journalist to cover her country's reconstruction, and finds it utterly unlike the world her parents have brought her up to believe in. In the Kabul of the 1970s, women wore miniskirts and drove buses; now few dare leave the house without the chadari. It is a society divided: between communists and mujahideen, between those who stayed and those who left - like Hamida herself. All around her is the West's first post-9/11 experiment with Islamic democracy.

But the ordinary people she meets are engaged in a different kind of nation building: a 'beautician without borders' whose school teaches its female pupils economic independence; a woman campaigning fiercely against warlords and armed thugs for a seat in her country's new parliament; an archaeologist digging for a giant sleeping Buddha, a symbol of Afghanistan's lost civilisation. Hamida must sift through the rubble of her family's past to understand the nation's future - and to reclaim her sense of what it means to be Afghan.

The pictures are of the actual book for sale.

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