The story of one family's past - and Afghanistan's search for a future.As Hamida is drawn deeper into her country's present, other members of her family come to life for us -- her great-grandfather the Sufi mystic, her poetess grandmother who urged women to unveil, her great-uncle who wrote the first democratic constitution, her brace cousin Bahodine who paid for his views with his life. In her family's past she finds the story of Afghanistan itself.She finds its future in people like the American Beautician teaching women a new kind of independence and the archaeologist digging for his country's lost civilization -- in the form of a giant Sleeping Buddha.
