One of the best books I have read so far. Highly recommend it.

What could have been a slice of romantic fluff, 'The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul" has a lot more depth due to its setting in the dangerous dusty streets of the Afghan city. Rodriguez could have kept her characters on the periphery of the harsh realities of life with the Taliban and random acts of violence, but she brings them into the narrative in the most hard-hitting way possible.
At it's heart, this novel has a fascinating dichotomy - a seemingly mundane life centred around an ordinary coffee shop - imagine a literary version of Central Perk in Friends - strong characters with their loves, losses and secrets. However rather than nestling amongst the brownstones of NYC, it's dropped into a world of religious fanaticism, women as second class citizens, strict rules by which to live or die and a constant threat of violence that underpins everything. A great slice of popular fiction that shows that romance novels can have unexpected depths.