An Afghan Woman's Odyssey is a first-person account of the tragedy that disrupted daily life in Afghanistan after the Communist coup of April 1978, events that eventually contributed to the volatile Taliban rule. This is the tale of a woman desperate to find her missing husband and her painful decision finally to abandon the search and to leave the country with her three children. Her story typifies the kinds of human-rights violations that became common practice after the Soviet invasion and made way for the later abuses of the Taliban.

Farooka Gauhari, formerly an...