The Taliban Cricket Club

The Taliban Cricket Club is a novel by the writer Timeri Murari, published in 2012 by Ecco.

Rukshana works for the Kabul Daily and supports her mother and brother. The summons to the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice is where the book begins in earnest: the minister announces that a tournament will be held in Afghanistan and that the winning team will go to Pakistan to train before representing the country, and Rukshana and the other journalists are to report that the regime is fair and just. She knows that the announcement is a performance, that the regime is not going to allow men and women to play together, and that a game built on its own code of conduct is a strange thing to impose on the country by decree. The novel follows her, her family and the team that forms around her brother as they work out what they can do with the opportunity they have been handed.

Murari has written a great deal about India and Afghanistan, and this novel mixes the restrictions of the period with the comedy of a bureaucracy trying to organise a sport it does not understand.