In her fourth novel for adults, Nadia Hashimi details a life upended by Afghanistan’s 1978 Saur Revolution. Ten-year-old Sitara Zamani lives a charmed life among the rose gardens of Kabul’s presidential palace. Her father, as President Daoud Khan’s most trusted adviser, buoys the existing government—and his family—with his steady wisdom. This all changes the night Sitara leaves her bed to look at the stars, and in doing so evades a coup led by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. Sitara’s family is murdered in the coup, but at the whim of a dodgy palace guard named Shair, an American diplomat and a vanload of hippies, Sitara begins a new life as “Aryana”