Nadia Hashimi

In Sparks like Stars, a 10-year-old Afghan girl’s life is shattered when a military coup in the palace kills her entire family. Escaping with the help of a palace guard, Sitara is smuggled out of Afghanistan and raised by an American diplomat. Thirty years later, now a successful surgeon in the U.S., she returns to Afghanistan to learn the truth about what happened on that terrible night. From the bestselling author of The Pearl That Broke Its Shell, The House Without Windows, and When the Moon Is Low.

Hashimi was born and raised in New York and New Jersey. Her parents were born in Afghanistan and left in the early 1970s. A pediatrician, she lives with her husband and four children in Potomac, Maryland. She is a member of the US Afghan Women's Council, Afghan American Foundation, and Montgomery County Commission on Health.

“The novel is an elegiac tribute to family and civilization—fragile collective entities that should be cherished while they still hold.”  -- BookPage. “Thrilling and moving” – Booklist. “I found myself eagerly following in a way I hadn’t remembered for a long time, impatient for the next twist and turn of the story."—NPR.