In her fourth novel for adults, Nadia Hashimi details a life upended by Afghanistan's 1978 Saur Revolution.

Ten-year-old Sitara Zamani lives a charmed life among the rose gardens of Kabul's presidential palace. Her father, as President Daoud Khan's most trusted adviser, buoys the existing government—and his family—with his steady wisdom. This all changes the night Sitara leaves her bed to look at the stars, and in doing so evades a coup led by the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan. Sitara's family is murdered in the coup, but at the whim of a dodgy palace guard named Shair, an American diplomat and a vanload of hippies, Sitara begins a new life as "Aryana" in the United States.

Sparks Like Stars is not a novel that looks away from pain. Hashimi has taken an inventory of the toll childhood instability takes on a person's emotional well-being. After her flight from Kabul, Aryana retreats further into herself as she is funneled into the American foster care system. She eventually becomes a physician (like the author), and when a man named Shair becomes her patient, memories of the coup overwhelm her. Aryana must decide how to best treat a dying man who may have murdered her family, and whether searching for their remains in Afghanistan will bring her the peace she has never found.

Hashimi's novel conveys its themes through a mix of frank and poetic language. Maxims from Aryana's father operate as a bridge between past and present, which at times feels contrived given the first-person narration. Still, Aryana is an intriguing character who likens herself to Anastasia Romanov, whose disputed escape from her family's political execution becomes a kind of obsession for Aryana.

When viewing ancient artifacts from Ai-Khanoum, a city lost to time, Aryana's father says, "People cannot imagine their civilization will not endure forever. Pride is blinding." This idea is woven throughout the novel, creating implications for not only the progressive Daoud regime but also the unfolding Cold War and the decadeslong American presence in Afghanistan. The politics of Sparks Like Stars are necessarily close to the heart of its heroine, whose fate is largely dictated by the whims of government agents. The novel is an elegiac tribute to family and civilization—fragile collective entities that should be cherished while they still hold.

Ten-year-old Sitara Zalmani is living comfortably in late 1970s Kabul, with her father a key aide to progressive president Sardar Daoud, when a Communist coup leads to Daoud's assassination and the death of Sitari's entire family. She's saved by a guard named Shair, but years later, as a successful surgeon in America, must consider whether he was responsible for those awful deaths. From the best-selling author of The Pearl That Broke Its Shell; with a 75,000-copy first printing.

A woman grapples with traumatic memories of the 1978 Afghanistan coup in Hashimi's intimate if lackluster latest (after A House Without Windows). Precocious Sitara Zalmani, 10, spends her days in Kabul's presidential palace, where her father is an adviser to the president. During the coup, Sitara's family is murdered in front of her before a palace guard, Shair Nabi, whisks her to safety and foists her off on Antonia Shephard, an American embassy worker. Antonia, along with her mother, hatches a plan to use Sitara's American-born, deceased sister's birth certificate to bring her to the U.S. But things fall apart at customs, and Sitara winds up in a foster home. By 2008, Sitara, now Aryana, is an oncological surgeon in New York City and has reunited with Antonia. Her boyfriend, Adam, doesn't know her full history and tries to tap her for help with fund-raising for his political career just as Shair unexpectedly shows up as a patient. With her relationship deteriorating and Shair's reappearance bringing memories to the surface, Aryana returns to Afghanistan with Antonia in an attempt to find some peace. While Hashimi rushes through Aryana's intervening years in the U.S., and the plot is fairly predictable, she does a good job developing Aryana's character. Still, this one fails to leave a mark. Agent: Helen Heller, the Helen Heller Agency. (Mar.)