BEHIND THE LENS

A photojournalist returns to Afghanistan, where a Taliban resurgence mars her reunion with her best friend in this novel.

Annie Hawkins Green, a Pulitzer Prize–winning photojournalist embedded with the coalition forces in southern Afghanistan, carries personal and professional baggage. She is a guilt-ridden, divorced woman whose “insane travel schedule” has made it necessary for her moody 15-year-old daughter to live with her ex-husband. She is still haunted by a previous incident in Afghanistan eight and a half years ago when a breach of military protocol escalated into a vicious terrorist attack that claimed the life of a young village girl with whom she had bonded. “I’ll come back,” she vows. “I promise. And next time, I’ll bring enough cameras for all the kids to have one.” She gets that opportunity when her best friend, Darya Faludi, an Afghan immigrant, relocates her family back to her native country to open a secondary school for girls, “which will give them a chance for an education, help them learn to think for themselves and become real citizens of the twenty-first century.” Annie agrees to teach a photography workshop. She is reunited with the Navy SEAL who helped rescue her. Later, a SEAL-led operation has far-reaching consequences, particularly for Darya’s family and her teenage daughter, Seema, who has been keeping suspicious company. Sacken, a college English professor and herself a photographer and world traveler, conveys a visceral sense of place, as keenly observed as the landscape photos featured on her website. “I could die here, today, in this cave high in the Hindu Kush Mountains,” Annie reflects during one tense moment. “No need for a body bag because no one will ever find me….No one will ever know what happened to me. Damn. How can I do this to my daughter?” Annie is a refreshingly relatable hero, brave enough to rise to the occasion but without gratuitous badass antics that would make her an easier sell to the big or small screen. Her romantic relationship with the SEAL likewise unfolds without purple prose. Only the standard-issue talking villain at the climax smacks of cliché. With some loose ends intriguingly left untied in the story, readers will anxiously await what develops for Annie.

A gripping Afghan tale starring a strong hero wielding a camera.