William Morrow Walker Percy once observed that "for most of us, the communication of beauty takes two — the teacher and the hearer, the pointer and the looker." When I was a child, one of my first experiences as a looker and hearer involved stories about lands far away — tales like The Secret Garden or Rudyard Kipling's stories set in Central Asia. I didn't realize then that the beauty I perceived in those stories was refracted through a lens of empire. But Sitara, the Afghan child heroine in Nadia Hashimi's new novel Sparks Like Stars, knows this. As her story opens Sitara quotes Kipling to prove the brutality of his claim over her heritage, and the strength of her own agency. Her life was violently disrupted during a military coup against the Afghan government in 1978. The beauty which is revealed through her unraveling, survival and search for her own resilience comes from a place of authenticity — she is a child of Afghanistan and her story isn't imposed, it's part and parcel of her heritage.