Each year, the storyteller, Hassan, gathers listeners to the city square to share their recollections of a young, foreign couple who mysteriously disappeared years earlier. As various witnesses describe their encounters with the couple, Hassan hopes to light upon the details that will explain what happened to them, and to absolve his own brother, who is in prison for their disappearance. But is this annual storytelling ritual a genuine attempt to uncover the truth, or is it intended instead to weave and ambiguous mythology around a crime? The first in an ambitious cycle of novels set in the Islamic world, The Storyteller of Marrakesh is an elegant exploration of the nature of reality and our shifting perceptions of truth.

   Following a desperate night-long battle, a group of beleaguered soldiers in an isolated base in Kandahar are faced with a lone woman demanding the return of her brother’s body. Is she a spy, a black widow, a lunatic, or is she what she claims to be: a grieving young sister intent on burying her brother according to local rites? Single-minded in her mission, she refuses to move from her spot on the field in full view of every soldier in the stark outpost. Her presence quickly proves dangerous as the camp’s tense, claustrophobic atmosphere comes to a boil when the men begin arguing about what to do next.
   Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya’s heartbreaking and haunting novel, The Watch, takes a timeless tragedy and hurls it into present-day Afghanistan. Taking its cues from the Antigone myth, Roy-Bhattacharya brilliantly recreates the chaos, intensity, and immediacy of battle, and conveys the inevitable repercussions felt by the soldiers, their families, and by one sister. The result is a gripping tour through the reality of this very contemporary conflict, and our most powerful expression to date of the nature and futility of war.

Chapter:
“Antigone”                                                                Read by Reha Zamani
“Lieutenant” and “Lieutenant’s Journal”                        Read by George Newbern
“Medic”                                                                     Dustin Rubin
“Ismene”                                                                  Zadran Wali
“Second Lieutenant”                                                   Kaleo Griffith
“First Sergeant”                                                          Richard Allen
“Captain”                                                                  Kris Koscheski