People Column

Rod Nordland, the longtime-OPC member who is bureau chief for The New York Times in Kabul, has landed what people in publishing call a “major deal.” He has signed with HarperCollins imprint Ecco to write a book tentatively titled The Lovers about an Afghan couple who married for love despite death threats from her family and criminal charges from authorities.

It is a Romeo and Juliet story. She is Tajik and Sunni Muslim; he is a Hazara and a Shiite.

Nordland began writing about the couple in March. Coverage has been challenging because on top of the secret travels of the couple, social norms in Afghanistan are that men do not talk, see and certainly not photograph unrelated women. Female translators are not a sure answer because most women cannot go across town without a male relative. The couple, Zakia and Muhammad Ali, lived in a remote town and then they fled, becoming even harder to find. The need to keep their location secret brought a dateline with an expanse of 50,000 square miles: Hindu Kush Range, Afghanistan.

Nordland won a Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for his work covering the impact of war on Cambodia, Vietnam and East Timor for The Philadelphia Inquirer. He won the OPC’s Ed Cunningham Award for best magazine writing from abroad in 1999 while working for Newsweek, where he became the chief foreign correspondent. He joined the Times in 2009 was named Kabul bureau chief in 2013.

In a column on nytimes.com in April, Nordland gave a hint that he might be thinking of a book.

“Some of the details about that will have to wait until another day, once we’re sure those who helped us, now scattered far and wide, will not mind,” he wrote. “Somehow, it all worked out — for the moment, since the couple is still on the run. As my son said, after reading the latest article, ‘It seems to stop in the middle of the story.’

“Indeed. If it were fiction, we could give it a satisfyingly happy ending, or perhaps more appropriate to a Romeo and Juliet tale, a suitably tragic one. But it’s journalism, and we honestly don’t know how it’s going to end.”
The book is expected to be published next fall and foreign editions are planned for Germany, Britain, Italy, Brazil, the Netherlands, Turkey, Portugal, Slovakia and Czech Republic.

“We expect this to be a very big book, not just about these two lovers, but about the terrible plight of women in Afghanistan as the American intervention there comes to an unsatisfactory end,” said Nordland’s agent, David Patterson of Foundry Literary + Media.”