Three years after the 1841 British occupation of Kabul, news of the invasion still hasn't reached the remote village of Char Bagh. Here, the biggest excitement of the season is a mysterious vagabond who has wandered onto a nearby hillside. Is he a madman? Perhaps. But he just might be a God-crazed madman, a malang, a man with the power to channel miracles. And indeed, he does soon begin to transform the lives of the villagers-the brooding headman Ibrahim, his djinn-haunted wife Soraya, the headman's charismatic sister-in-law, the widowed Khadija... But the isolation of Char Bagh is about to end. The Widow's Husband, an epic work of historical fiction, is the first novel to tell the story of British imperialism from the Afghan side.