Lost & Misrepresented Voices of Afghanistan Chapter 1 Page 13

Seierstad was fortunate enough to be of the position of a ‘liminal’ space. She neither belonged to the Islamic culture or the Afghan heritage. Instead, her position as a journalist gave her the free reign to intermingle between the normal constraints that a female would find herself in, therefore allowing her a poignantly and undistinguished account to voice both genders freely within the Afghanistan community. Seierstad wrote an authentic based novel on the real plights of Afghanistan. She was very fortunate to be permitted to meet a very charismatic character such as Sultan Khan on whom the novel is based. In Byatt’s On Histories and Stories, Byatt reiterates that:

As writers of fiction become preoccupied with truthfulness and accuracy, writers of literary