Booklets | Selection 2 | Guenter G. Rodewald | Consultant

The characters:
Farah Hafez: Paul Chapelle:
Farah Hafez is a 38-year-old journalist with the
national newspaper Algemeen Nederlands Dagblad
(AND).
At the age of nine she escaped her native
Afghanistan after her father, Home Affairs Minister
Aadel Gailani, lost his life during the communist
uprising.
Her father's death in 1978, followed less than a year
later by that of her mother, put an abrupt and
traumatic end to Farah's sheltered childhood.
Farah would like to reconnect with her past, but out
of fear of being hurt she avoids every opportunity to
do so.
The discovery of a seriously injured Afghan boy in
the woods near Amsterdam serves as an unexpected
turning point in Farah’s life.
Not only does this lead to her first major piece of
investigative journalism, it also forces her to face up
to the reality of the childhood she thought she'd lost
forever.
In the summer of 1968, eighteen-year-old Dutch
artist and hippie Isobel Vallent meets American
journalist Raylan Chapelle during a student
demonstration in a Kabul market square.
The protest is broken up by police, but the encounter
is the beginning of a passionate love affair. A year
later Paul Chapelle is born.
Paul is still a child when war correspondent Raylan
Chapelle loses his life during one of his assignments.
Following in his father's footsteps, Paul becomes a
journalist himself, but he's plagued by the fear of
never being able to live up to his late father's
reputation.
He drifts through life, working as a reporter and
foreign correspondent in Paris, Athens and Istanbul
and then Johannesburg in a futile attempt to feel at
home somewhere. As he and Farah get to know each
other better, Paul discovers that their childhood past
in Kabul connects them in ways he could have never
imagined.