The Opium Prince

A tragic car accident plunges a US foreign aid agent into 1970s Afghanistan's thriving opium trade amidst the stirrings of a Communist coup.

Born to an American mother and a late Afghan war hero-turned-magnate, Daniel Sajadi has spent his life navigating a complex identity. After years in Los Angeles, he is returning home to Kabul for the first time as the head of a US foreign aid agency dedicated to staunching the growth of the poppy fields in Fever Valley that feed the world's opiate epidemic.

But on the drive back to Kabul from an anniversary trip with his wife, Rebecca, Daniel hits and kills a young Kochi girl named Telaya. Nomad tribes are ignored in the eyes of the law, and Daniel is let off with a nominal fine due to a mysterious witness at the scene—a man named Taj Maleki, who turns out to be a prominent opium khan. Wracked with guilt and visions of Telaya, Daniel begins to unravel, running from his rapidly crumbling marriage and threats of blackmail and murder from the man who would do anything to save his poppy fields from eradication.

In a powerful literary thriller debut that captures the tumultuous, sometimes violent trajectory of revolution, Jasmine Aimaq draws the often invisible lines between criminal empires and shifting political regimes.