A House Without Windows truly embodies the transformative power of reading. The story of modern-day village-life in Afghanistan told though the voices and thoughts of young Afghanis is at once accessible and distancing. So many of the emotions and feelings of daily living are the same, yet the cultural mores are so different from my own that they were sometimes difficult to understand.

This is Zeba’s story. Zeba is the abused wife of Kamal. She dutifully looks after their house and compound and raises their four children. One day, her son, Bashir, returns home with his sisters, Shabnam and Kareema, and finds their baby sister, Rima, screaming her head off in the house. He senses something is terribly wrong. He goes in search of his mother in the back courtyard and finds her next to his father covered in blood. Kamal is dead with a hatchet buried in the back of his skull.

Did she do it? Or didn’t she?

That is the question that is asked by every character in the book and by the reader through most of the story. It’s a murder-mystery story that is largely told through Zeba’s eyes and that of her Afghani but American-educated legal aid lawyer, Yusuf.

Yusuf has a sharp legal mind but his Afghani down-home instincts have been dulled by his years in America. This leads him to make some missteps in his investigation and legal representation. However, his deep desire to do right by his client stands him in good stead, even when she downright refuses to talk to him or participate in any way in her defense. Reba simply won’t open her mouth to tell him what exactly happened. This obviously begs the question: What is she hiding? This thinking sends him off to her village to knock on doors and chat to her neighbors, which sets off a chain of events that unknowingly help him in his case.

One surprising thing about this novel is the sub-story of Afghanistan’s fledgling legal system. The judge, Qazi Najeeb, is intent on making history with this case, but does he have the legal mind to be able to grasp far-reaching ideals and chart new territory? However, his willingness to follow the letter of the currently established law makes him more open to Yusuf’s foreign notions of insanity defense, for example. Yet his ruling for a testing of that defense is uniquely old Afghani.

“Tonight, you will listen to the sorrows of my soul. Though tomorrow, you will forget all that has been told.”

In the meantime, Yusuf has his own story of trying to fit back into the Afghani society he had fled as a child. His mother is after him to get married (of course!), and he’s conflicted. Should he go with one of his American girlfriends or should he go the traditional route and choose an Afghani bride? He’s shown as a romantic soul who can’t decide whether he should commit his hand in marriage, and his soft-focus interests keep the romantic side of the book going.

The most influential secondary character is this story is Gulnaz, Zeba’s mother.  Gulnaz is a well-known but feared and perhaps reviled character in the region. Her unusual green eyes, uncommon beauty, her ability to make things go her way, and her reputation for spells and casting the evil eye means she’s never accepted by anyone. Zeba’s story and how she came to be in that courtyard covered in blood really begins in Gulnaz’s childhood. Ms. Hashimi builds a complex tale of personalities and histories that come together to make Zeba who she is today.

I was most heartened by another secondary character, a young female journalist from Kabul named Sultana. On one hand, there’s Zeba, who has lived a life of dependence, dejection, and deprivation, a life lived by generations of Afghani women before her. And on the other hand, there’s Sultana, who wears jeans, lives alone, and works with men in a hard-hitting journalistic  career. Both women are of a similar age and yet their lives are dramatically different.

I was fascinated by how Ms. Hashimi depicted these three women, who are so very different from each other and each of whom is one of the faces of modern Afghanistan. It is through these women that the reader is able to understand the cultural underpinnings of the society. So what is the world of women?

“Our world is the spaces between the rocks and meat. We see the face that should but doesn’t smile, the sliver of sun between dead tree branches. Time passes differently through a woman’s body. We are haunted by all the hours of yesterday and teased by a few moments of tomorrow. That is how we live—torn between what has already happened and what is yet to come.”

One of the cultural codes that was a struggle for me to grasp was what constitutes honor, and men’s honor in particular; how a female family member raises or lowers it; and what men will do to appease their sense of honor. My struggle was partly due to the recoiling from the staunch patriarchy and abuse of women and partly from trying to understand how such thinking is acceptable to the men and women living it daily.

If a woman is raped, it lowers not only her status in society but also the honor of her husband or father or brother, whichever male figure was the head of the household. He then has the right to seek retribution by killing her rapist and also by mistreating her. She can be sold in marriage to anyone who would be willing to have her or sold off for menial labor. Once soiled goods, always soiled goods, and it doesn’t matter if the soiling was not her fault.

“Girls without honor were better off dead, many thought.”

If a woman is badly mistreated by her husband and this is widely known in the village, this does not lower the husband’s honor. However, if the wife retaliates by killing him, then his brother can kill her with his bare hands to restore the family honor. A murderess’s son is tainted by the same blood, so he takes his lack of honor from her, rather than having his own honor as a male child.

For us in the western world, this is all horrifying. However, Ms. Hashimi builds a case for how this works in Afghan society and how some people rail against it, but many accept it and live with it.

A House Without Windows is far more of a cultural and societal commentary than a murder mystery. But don’t mistake it all for dry prosing on with fiction only as window dressing.  That would be doing this book a grave disservice. The story is clearly a mystery, the unraveling of which requires the unraveling of the mysteries of Afghan society, and it is all endlessly fascinating, because of the beauty of Ms. Hashimi’s prose and writing skills.