The Finest Hotel in Kabul

Doucet builds her history of Afghanistan around a single fixed point: Kabul's Intercontinental, tracing the staff, managers and long-serving employees who kept the hotel running through monarchy, Soviet occupation, civil war and Taliban rule. It's a clever structural bet, and mostly pays off, letting decades of upheaval register through hotel ledgers, evacuated guests and the people who never left. The device does strain in places, with the hotel's own story occasionally crowding out the wider political history it's meant to anchor, and the reporting-process detail can slow the momentum. But as an attempt to tell a country's story from the ground up rather than from the palace or the battlefield, it's a genuinely distinctive angle from a journalist who was there for most of it.