The Finest Hotel in Kabul

A People's History of Afghanistan

By: Lyse Doucet

Narrated by: Lyse Doucet

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE

The story of a hotel. The story of a nation.

When the Inter-Continental Kabul opened in 1969, Afghanistan’s first luxury hotel symbolised a dream of a modernising country connected to the world.

More than fifty years on, the Inter-Continental is still standing. It has endured Soviet occupation, multiple coups, a grievous civil war, a US invasion and the rise, fall and rise of the Taliban. History lives within its scarred windows and walls.

Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent, has been checking into the Inter-Continental since 1988. And here, she uses its story to craft a richly immersive history of modern Afghanistan.

It is the story of Hazrat, the septuagenarian housekeeper who still holds fast to his Inter-Continental training from the hotel’s 1970s glory days—an era of haute cuisine and high fashion, when Afghanistan was a kingdom and Kabul was the ‘Paris of Asia’. It is the story of Abida, who became the first female chef to cook in the Inter-Con’s famous kitchen after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. And it is the story of Malalai and Sadeq, the twenty-something staff who seized every opportunity offered by two decades of fragile democracy—only to witness the Taliban roaring back in 2021.

The result is a remarkably vivid history of how Afghans have survived a half century of destruction and disruption. It is the story of a hotel but also the story of a people.

Best version of Afghanistan’s recent history ever told.

This hotel has been a part of multiple generations of my family. From my grandparents, to my parents and finally to me - when I spent countless times walking its lobby, enjoying meals at its restaurants and attending events there - as I watched it transform from a beat up relic of the past to a thriving hotel from my time in Kabul between 2002 -2016. And now I can share Lyse’s book with my nieces and nephews born in US who might never have the chance to experience the finest hotel in Kabul.