Review — FARISHTA by Patricia McArdle (Paraguay)
Farishta by Patricia McArdle (Paraguay 1972–74) Riverhead Books 401 pages Riverhead Books 2011 $16.00 (paperback), $4.99 (Kindle) Reviewed by Bill Preston (Thailand 1977-80) • In the Prologue to Farishta, we learn that twenty-one years earlier young career diplomats Angela Morgan and husband Tom were posted to Beirut. There, Tom was killed in a terrorist bombing of the U.S. Embassy; Angela, pregnant at the time, was injured and subsequently lost the child. Devastated, Angela was posted back to the State Department in Washington, DC. As the novel opens, Angela, now forty-seven and having worked at a series of unfulfilling dead-end positions at the State Department, learns that she is soon to be posted for a year with a British Army unit at a Provisional Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Mazār-i-Sharīf, Afghanistan. The PRT was a remote military outpost that conducted surveillance patrols in the northern provinces. Having hoped for an . . .
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Many thanks, and great to hear that you will be sharing Farishta with your book club.