The novel was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award and won the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award in 2003 it also won the Ruth Schwartz Children’s Book Award (now the Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children’s Book Award) that same year. The second novel in the series, Parvana’s Journey (2002), follows Parvana’s search for her mother and siblings after her father’s death. The novel ends with Parvana and her father The girls find ways to earn more money as boys - from selling things in the busy marketplace to digging for bones in bombed-out graveyards.īy the end of the novel, Parvana is reunited with her father, only to realize that the rest of her family is in danger because the Taliban took over the area they were travelling to for her older sister’s wedding. One day, she runs into a tea boy, Shafiq, who turns out to be her old classmate, Shauzia, who is also disguised as a boy to support her family. She offers her reading and writing services in the marketplace, replacing her father in the same spot. Parvana steps up as the breadwinner, cutting her hair and disguising herself as a boy named Kaseem so she can earn money and buy food for her family. Without an adult male to provide for them, they will not survive. Parvana and her family are devastated, but it soon becomes apparent that One day, the Taliban arrests him for having a “foreign” education. Parvana remembers their old life, including their “Western” toilet, but she cannot remember a time before the war: “Kabul had once been beautiful… For most of Parvana’s life, the city has been in ruins, and it was hard for her to imagine it another way.”Įvery day, Parvana accompanies her father to the marketplace where he sells his services as a reader and writer.

The family lost their house, most of their belongings and even their eldest son, Hossain, to the frequent bombings. To give up their regular jobs - her mother was a writer and her father was a university professor. Her parents are both academics who attended Oxford, but the Taliban’s strict regime forced them

Parvana and her family, which includes her 17-year-old sister, Nooria, and her two-year-old brother, Ali, live in a bombed-out one-room apartment in Kabul. The Breadwinner goes beyond the sensationalized media headlines and takes readers into war-torn, Taliban-run Afghanistan through the eyes of 11-year-old Parvana ( see also Canada and the War in Afghanistan). These stories became the basis and inspiration for The Breadwinner series. During that time, she began to interview and record the stories of women in the camps.

In the 1990s, author and activist Deborah Ellis travelled to Pakistan to help people in Afghan refugee camps.

The breadwinner trilogy