Books set in Tajikistan

About the literature of Tajikistan

Tajikistan claims Rudaki, the poet of the ninth and tenth centuries, as its national poet, and Persian verse remains the heart of its literature. Tajik is a form of Persian, written in Cyrillic since Soviet times, and some writers from Tajikistan work in Russian instead. Very little of either has reached English. Farzaneh Khojandi, from Khujand, writes lyric poems on love, womanhood and post-Soviet life, gathered in Poems: Farzaneh Khojandi.

Start with Andrei Volos's Hurramabad, translated from Russian, which moves from the late Soviet years to the civil war in a fictional Tajik town. Annika Milisic-Stanley, who lived in Dushanbe, wrote The Disobedient Wife, a novel pairing a British expatriate wife with her Tajik maid, Nargis, whose strength she comes to admire as both their lives unravel.