An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan

Part travelogue, part historical evocation, part personal quest and part reflection on the joys and perils of passage, An Unexpected Light is the account of Jason Elliot's journey to a country considered off-limits to travellers for twenty years.Setting off from the capital, Kabul, under daily missile attack from its beseigers, Elliot ignores numerous warnings and heads on horseback into the snowbound mountains of the North and the former battlefields of the Soviet army's 'hidden war'. Here the forbidding beauty of the Afghan landscape kindles a moving recollection of the author's life as a clandestine young guest of the mujaheddin, ten years earlier, during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.Jason Elliot has created a narrative mosaic of startling prose which captures perfectly the emotional allure of a seldom-glimpsed world. In it the reader will encounter traditional wisdom, contemporary anecdotes and insights into matters ranging from antipersonnel mines to Sufism.