Say I Am You

In the fragile optimism of post-Taliban Kabul in 2006, Iranian-American doctor Behnaz Mazdak has built the life she always imagined. Meaningful work, an unlikely community of friends, a city that needs exactly what she has to give. Her life is upended when a suicide bomb detonates in a neighbourhood internet café. Although Behnaz walks out almost unscathed, her former patient, Zayneb Kazem, an Afghan journalist whose courage and recklessness mirror her own, is carried out unconscious and fighting for her life.

As Zayneb lies suspended between survival and something worse, and her investigation into the forces reshaping Afghanistan draws unwanted attention from those with the power to silence her, Behnaz becomes her most unlikely advocate. But as the lines between humanitarian work and military agenda grow harder to hold, she must decide how far that commitment to this country and to this woman actually goes. A novel about two women navigating the same world under radically different rules, about the ethics of bearing witness, and about what survives when idealism meets the limits of what one person can do, Say I Am You is also an act of remembering, a love letter to a place and a people that the world has too often seen only through the lens of war, written by someone whose life was forever shaped by her time in Kabul.