Books set in Uzbekistan

The Devils' Dance

Hamid Ismailov

Two Uzbekistans held in one mind. In 1938 the writer Abdulla Qodiriy is taken to the NKVD prison in Tashkent during Stalin's terror, and in his cell he builds, sentence by sentence, an unwritten novel about the last khans of Kokand and the poet-queen Nodira. The map runs from the old city of Tashkent down some two hundred and thirty kilometres to the Ferghana Valley, where the nineteenth-century strand plays out in Kokand, Margilan and Ferghana.

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