Bookshelf: 'Khair Khana,' 'Oprichnik'

Kamela Sediqi was not yet 20 when the Taliban took over in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1996. When her father, a military man under former strongman Najibullah (who was killed by the Taliban), moved out of Kabul, he left Sediqi in charge of her sisters and younger brother. The Taliban issued their edicts: Women were to stay at home, they were not permitted to work and they were forced to wear the face-covering chadri in public. In an effort to support her family and fight the boredom, Sediqi and her sisters began to sew dresses and sell them to shopkeepers.

The risk was enormous -- just being on the street alone or speaking to male shopkeepers, much less selling the garments, could mean beating, imprisonment, even death. But the business grew. Soon, she employed 34 women and taught sewing classes in her home. Orders poured in, some of them from the wives of Taliban leaders who remained in power until 2001's American-led invasion. Sediqi's business has continued to grow, and she now advises female entrepreneurs.

Like Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin's "Three Cups of Tea," Gayle Tzemach Lemmon's "The Dressmaker of Khair Khana: Five Sisters, One Remarkable Family, and the Woman Who Risked Everything to Keep Them Safe" (Harper, $24.99) is pure inspiration. Like "Reading Lolita in Tehran," it reveals in acute detail the anxiety of ordinary people trying to fold their lives around the whims and laws of abusive regimes.

Vladimir Sorokin's "Day of the Oprichnik" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23), translated by Jamey Campbell, is set in Russia in 2028. It follows a day in the life of Andrei Danilovich Komiaga, a character reminiscent of Tony Stark (played by Robert Downey Jr.) in "Iron Man" (before his revelation) or the hedonistic Oblonsky in "Anna Karenina." Komiaga is a member of the secret police -- on any given day he rounds up the orphaned children of murdered nobles, squeezes his constituency for bribes, maybe even murders a dissident or two.

With his finger-lickin', luxury-lovin' persona, he's a bit of a caricature. "Health isn't the least thing in our dangerous life," he earnestly tells the reader. "I take care of mine: I play skittles twice a week, then I swim, I drink maple juice with ground wild strawberries, I eat overgrown fern seeds, I breathe properly."

The height of Komiaga's day is a series of bizarre sexual rituals with his fellow secret police that involve fish and steam. Sorokin writes (here and in his recently republished "Ice Trilogy") about the absurdities of power. "Day of the Oprichnik" is an arrow in the heart of the Russian mafia; 50 years ago it would have been aimed at the Communist Party.

Camilla Gibb's "The Beauty of Humanity Movement" (Penguin Press, $25.95) begins and ends with pho -- in a noodle shop in Old Hanoi. Old man Hung is a true professional -- his delicious soup is a metaphor for a dying way of life. Each morning, he spoons the broth for customers, a broth that depends on his long-standing relationships with local butchers. He remembers the days back in the '50s when his shop was a gathering place for dissident artists, until many of them were taken to re-education camps, where they formed the Beauty of Humanity Movement, celebrating poetry and art that had little to do with the party line.

One morning, many decades later, a stranger appears at the shop -- a young woman named Maggie, born in Vietnam but raised in America, who has come back to look for clues to her father's disappearance after his escape from the camps. Gibb drapes her story over good, strong bones -- characters (including the grandson of a poet friend of Hung's) that span several generations, the nobility of the artists in contrast to the war and its political players. But the true beauty of the novel radiates from the details -- the smell of the soup, the feeling of the early-morning streets, the sense of community in poverty and the community woven by memories. "But what's the real Vietnam?" Maggie asks the grandson of the poet. "This is a country that erases its own history."