A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear Atiq Rahimi Chatto & Windus, 208pp, £12.99 ISBN 0701176733

Farhad is a student living in Kabul just before the Soviet invasion in 1979. He is randomly attacked by a group of soldiers as he wanders home drunk one night: they beat him to within an inch of his life and leave him lying in a gutter. Eventually a stranger finds and shelters him in her home. For two days he lies in her dark house concussed and disorientated, a prisoner of his dreams. The narrative takes us deep inside his fractured mind, a place where nightmares, memory and hallucination are indistinguishable.

The author fled Afghanistan in 1984. He has made a number of films and documentaries, and is about to publish a collection of photographs. Like much of his work, his writing is a collection of impressions and images, whose abstract style may not be to everyone's taste. For those who like a coherent beginning, middle and end, reading this book might feel a bit like being knocked over the head. But the effect is deliberate: Atiq Rahimi distorts reality in order to challenge what we accept. "Our dreams seem more plausible than our lives," he tells us. "But if they didn't, all those revolutions, those wars, those religions and those ideologies could never have been dreamed up."

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