Zoya's Story

Author: John Follain
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062037293
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Book Description
Kabul was always more beautiful in the snow. Even the piles of rotting rubbish in my street, the only source of food for the scrawny chickens and goats that our neighbors kept outside their mud houses, looked beautiful to me after the snow had covered them in white during the long night. Though she is only twenty-three, Zoya has witnessed and endured more tragedy and terror than most people experience in a lifetime. Born in a land ravaged by war, she was robbed of her parents when they were murdered by Muslim fundamentalists. Devastated, she fled Kabul with her grandmother and started a new life in exile in Pakistan. She joined the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), an organization that challenged the crushing edicts of the Taliban government, and she took destiny into her own hands, joining a dangerous, clandestine war to save her nation. Direct and unsentimental, Zoya vividly brings to life the realities of growing up in a Muslim culture, the terror of living in a perpetual war zone, the pain of losing those she has loved, the horrors of a woman’s life under the Taliban, and the discovered healing and transformation that lead her on a path of resistance.

Zoya

Author: Danielle Steel
Publisher: Dell
ISBN: 0307567060
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 514

Book Description
Against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution and World War I Europe, Zoya, young cousin to the Tsar, flees St. Petersburg to Paris to find safety. Her entire world forever changed, she faces hard times and joins the Ballet Russe in Paris. And then, when life is kind to her, Zoya moves on to a new and glittering life in New York. The days of ease are all too brief as the Depression strikes, and she loses everything yet again. It is her career, and the man she meets in the course of it, which ultimately save her, as she rebuilds her life through the war years and beyond. And it is her family that comes to mean everything to her. From the roaring twenties to the 1980's, Zoya remains a rare and spirited woman whose legacy will live on.

Little Daughter

Author: Zoya Phan
Publisher: Pocket Books
ISBN: 9781847394262
Category : Burma
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Zoya Phan was born in the remote jungles of Burma, to the Karen ethnic group. For decades the Karen have been under attack from Burma's military junta; Zoya's mother was a guerrilla soldier, her father a freedom activist. She lived in a bamboo hut on stilts by the Moei River; she hunted for edible fungi with her much-loved adopted brother, Say Say. Many Karen are Christian or Buddhist, but Zoya's parents were animist, venerating the spirits of forest, river and moon. Her early years were blissfully removed from the war. At the age of fourteen, however, Zoya's childhood was shattered as the Burmese army attacked. With their house in flames, Zoya and her family fled. So began two terrible years of running from guns, as Zoya joined thousands of refugees hiding in the jungle. Her family scattered, Zoya sought sanctuary across the border in a Thai refugee camp. Conditions in the camp were difficult, and Zoya now had to care for her ailing mother. Zoya, a gifted pupil, was eventually able to escape, first to Bangkok and then, with her enemies still pursuing her, in 2004 she fled to the UK and claimed asylum. The following year, at a 'free Burma' march, she was plucked from the crowd to appear on the BBC, the first of countless interviews with the world's media. She became the face of a nation enslaved, rubbing shoulders with presidents and film stars. By turns uplifting, tragic and entirely gripping, this is the extraordinary true story of the girl from the jungle who became an icon of a suffering land.

Things We Left Unsaid

Author: Zoya Pirzad
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1780740840
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Book Description
A heartwarming and humorous insight into the hopes and aspirations of Iranians in the years that led up to the Islamic Revolution Deep in an Iranian suburb, made rich by the booming oil industry, Clarice Ayvazian lives a comfortable life surrounded by the gentle bickering of her children and her gossiping friends and relatives. Happy being at the heart of her family, she devotes herself to their every need. But when an enigmatic Armenian family move in across the street, something begins to gnaw at Clarice's contentment: a feeling that there may be more to life – and to her – than this. Dizzy with the sweltering heat and simmering emotions, Clarice begins to feel herself come alive to possibilities previously unimaginable. Set in Iran prior to the Islamic revolution, Zoya Pirzad's award-winning novel is perfect for fans of Anne Tyler, crafting an intimate portrait of family life – its joys and its compromises – and how we find a happiness that endures.

Undaunted

Author: Zoya Phan
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439134731
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
Once a royal kingdom and then part of the British Empire, Burma long held sway in the Western imagination as a mythic place of great beauty. In recent times, Burma has been torn apart and isolated by one of the most brutal dictatorships in the world. Now, Zoya of the, a young member ofthe Karen tribe in Burma, bravely comes forward with her astonishingly vivid story of growing up in the idyllic green mansions of the jungle, and her violent displacement by the military junta that has controlled the country for almost a half century. This same cadre has also relentlessly hunted Zoya and her family across borders and continents. Undaunted tells of Zoya’s riveting adventures, from her unusual childhood in a fascinating remote culture, to her years on the run, to her emergence as an activist icon. Named for a courageous Russian freedom fighter of World War II, Zoya was fourteen when Burmese aircraft bombed her peaceful village, forcing her and her family to flee through the jungles to a refugee camp just over the border in Thailand. After being trapped in refugee camps for years in poverty and despair, her family scattered: as her father became more deeply involved in the struggle for freedom, Zoya and her sister left their mother in the camp to go to a college in Bangkok to which they had won scholarships. But even as she attended classes, Zoya, the girl from the jungle, had to dodge police and assume an urban disguise, as she was technically an illegal immigrant and subject to deportation. Although, following graduation, she obtained a comfortable job with a major communications company in Bangkok, Zoya felt called back to Burma to help her mother and her people, millions of whom still have to live on the run today in order to survive—in fact, more villages have been destroyed in eastern Burma than in Darfur, Sudan. After a plot to kill her was uncovered, in 2004 Zoya escaped to the United Kingdom, where she began speaking at political conferences and demonstrations—a mission made all the more vital by her father’s assassination in 2008 by agents of the Burmese regime. Like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Zoya has become a powerful spokesperson against oppressors, undaunted by dangers posed to her life. Zoya’s love of her people, their land, and their way of life fuels her determination to survive, and in Undaunted she hauntingly brings to life a lost culture and world, putting faces to the stories of the numberless innocent victims of Burma’s military

Invitation to a Bonfire

Author: Adrienne Celt
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1635571510
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Book Description
Selected by Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Parade, Oprah.com, and MSN.com as one of the best books to read this summer! The seductive story of a dangerous love triangle, inspired by the infamous Nabokov marriage, with a spellbinding psychological thriller at its core. In the 1920s, Zoya Andropova, a young refugee from the Soviet Union, finds herself in the alien landscape of an elite all-girls New Jersey boarding school. Having lost her family, her home, and her sense of purpose, Zoya struggles to belong, a task made more difficult by the malice her peers heap on scholarship students and her new country's paranoia about Russian spies. When she meets the visiting writer and fellow Russian émigré Leo Orlov--whose books Zoya has privately obsessed over for years--her luck seems to have taken a turn for the better. But she soon discovers that Leo is not the solution to her loneliness: he's committed to his art and bound by the sinister orchestrations of his brilliant wife, Vera. As the reader unravels the mystery of Zoya, Lev, and Vera's fate, Zoya is faced with mounting pressure to figure out who she is and what kind of life she wants to build. Grappling with class distinctions, national allegiance, and ethical fidelity--not to mention the powerful magnetism of sex--Invitation to a Bonfire investigates how one's identity is formed, irrevocably, through a series of momentary decisions, including how to survive, who to love, and whether to pay the complicated price of happiness.

Ravage

Author: Tillie Cole
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
ISBN: 1250086302
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Book Description
Is finding one's true love worth committing the greatest sacrifice of all? Taken as a teen, prisoner 194 was stripped of his name and freewill, meticulously honed to be a ruthless machine. Even as he tries to fight his captors hold on him he knows that obedience is the only way to save his sister, who is the one person that keeps him from turning into a monster. As a young girl Zoya Kostava barely escaped the brutal attack that killed her entire family. Now twenty five she lives in secrecy. That is until she hears her brother also survived and is living with their greatest enemy. Zoya risks her safety and anonymity to find the brother she thought dead and is captured by a beautiful, brutal man. A man who both captivates and scares her, in him she sees a soul as lost as her own. They both have so much to lose will they be able to save each other...and survive.

The Zoya Factor

Author: Anuja Chauhan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788172238179
Category : Advertising executives
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description

Afghanistan

Author: C. Heather Bleaney
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900414532X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 412

Book Description
Presents a thematically indexed bibliography devoted to Afghanistan. Following the pattern established by one of its major data sources, viz, the acclaimed Index Islamicus, both journal articles and book publications are included and indexed.

Zoya's Gift

Author: Gail McCormick
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1647426839
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Book Description
Still recovering from the heartbreak of infertility, memoirist Gail McCormick and her husband volunteer to host two Children of Chernobyl for a summer reprieve from radiation exposure. Fate pairs the Seattle couple with eight-year-old Ukrainian twin sisters from Belarus—and rekindles Gail’s childhood dream to build a bridge of peace between the US and the former Soviet Union. Over four summers of mayhem and magic with the twins, a deep relationship takes root. When the girls age out of the program that brought them to Seattle, Gail confronts her Cold War fears and travels with her husband to reunite with them in Ukraine and Belarus. On this soul-making trip to a land of unspeakable loss, she celebrates life in the homes of an accordion-playing Chernobyl hero and a barefooted babushka who distills her own vodka, and—behind the remnants of the Iron Curtain—finds her place as an honorary mother and babushka in a four-generation family of former Soviets. Poignant and culturally rich, her narrative transports readers to storied cities, villages, and dachas from Kyiv to Minsk. Written with reverence, insight, humor, and hope, Zoya’s Gift illuminates the complexities, joys, and importance of reaching across political, class, and cultural divides.