Sparks Like Stars: A Story of Survival, Identity, and the Haunting Echoes of the Past

"The past is never truly buried. It flickers like a dying star—distant, but never gone."

Kabul, 1978. Sitara Zalmani is the cherished daughter of a high-ranking Afghan official, growing up in a city on the cusp of transformation. Under the leadership of progressive minds, Afghanistan is flourishing, and for ten-year-old Sitara, the world is full of light and boundless possibility. But in a single night, everything shatters. A brutal communist coup claims the lives of the President—and Sitara’s entire family.

Alone in the world, she is smuggled from the carnage by a palace guard named Shair. In the chaos of loss and betrayal, she finds refuge in the home of an American diplomat, who spirits her away to the United States. There, she becomes Aryana Shepherd, a name she wears like armor, burying the nightmares of her past beneath ambition and resilience. Decades later, she is a successful surgeon in New York, far from the blood-soaked halls of Kabul—until the unthinkable happens.

One day, an elderly patient enters her examination room. Shair. The man who saved her. The man who might have killed everyone she loved. The past, long buried, has come clawing back, demanding justice, demanding answers. In a moment, Aryana’s carefully constructed world crumbles, and she is faced with an agonizing choice: walk away, or return to the country she once called home, to uncover the truth that has haunted her for forty years.

From the glittering streets of 1970s Kabul to the shadowed battlegrounds of modern Afghanistan, Sparks Like Stars is a searing tale of betrayal and resilience, of home and identity, of the ghosts we carry and the memories we refuse to let go. With luminous prose and unflinching depth, Nadia Hashimi delivers a novel that is both heart-wrenching and hopeful. 

Asking: Can we ever truly escape our past? Or is it only by facing it that we can finally be free?