For most Indians, Kabul is a city that is close, yet all too familiar, yet unfamiliar. When Taran Khan arrived in Kabul in the spring of 2006, five years after the Taliban regime was overthrown, she was sternly warned never to walk. Her instincts compelled her to do the opposite: to take that first, precarious step and enter city life with the unique intimacy that comes from being a pedestrian. She didn't stop until 2013, when she returned to India.

In Shadow City, Taran Khan paints a lyrical, personal, and reflective portrait of a city we know primarily in terms of conflict and peace. As a Muslim woman raised in a small town in India, Taran discovered she had access to parts of Kabul unknown to travelers before her. The result reads like an elegiac prose map of the city, rich with surprises—from the glamour of wedding halls that sparkle like an alien version of Las Vegas; to the mental hospital where women are abandoned and isolated but live in a rare space of freedom and solitude; to the bookseller behind The Bookseller of Kabul, who sued Asen Seierstad for photographing him and then published the rebuttal, which he proudly displays in his shop window.