Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Amy Waldman, whose new novel A Door In The Earth was released by Little Brown in August of this year.

Amy is a national correspondent for Atlantic Monthly. She, at the NYT collaborated on the Pulitzer Prize winning series Portraits Of Grief, which chronicled the lives of every victim of 9/11.

Her novel, Submission (a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award) was published in 2001.

A Door In The Earth explores a country and a people that we as Americans are slightly aware of but only from skimming an article or watching a sound bite on CNN or listening to a politician spout some words about withdrawal or military victory.

And although, as most of you know I blame pretty much everything on Trump from solar eclipses to hurricanes in Alabama, in this case I have to make an exception

Beyond that superficial level I just mentioned we really know nothing (myself included) about the nation and its citizenry (and I don’t even know if those are the right terms).


But in A Door In The Earth, through the eyes of Pareen (a first generation American, born to Afghan parents) and her ears because she can speak Dari, she can converse with the villagers she meets, as she follows the trail of her idol Gideon Crane along a convoluted path of truth and lies, a tenuous peace and an orchestrated war, until she reaches a resolution of sorts, but key to all of these is she leads us along, so that in the end, the “through a glass darkly” that we all glance through is cleared a good bit and we leave with lots of questions and some answers.