If Edward Said is right, and our age is the age of the refugee, then Zaheda Ghani’s novel of belonging and exile is a book for our times. This panoramic novel evokes Afghanistan before the Taliban, before the Soviet invasion, and before the one-party state, and it follows three characters as they make the transition through turbulent times from noble beginnings in Herat to their refugee status in Sydney.

It’s almost rude that amid all that she can write such a moving and evocative page-turner: the story of one family and their country torn apart by war – which is a love story too.

Pomegranate and Fig tells the story of a family, like her own, born in Afghanistan and exiled to India and later Australia.

Reading this novel, your heart agonises over the characters as they watch their ancestral home become unrecognisable before their eyes

A deeply moving novel about tradition, love, war and the sorrow & hope exile will bring.

A deeply affecting debut novel which began as the handwritten diary Ghani wrote at age nine, after arriving in Australia as an Afghani refugee.