AN AGING ENGLISHMAN LIVES IN A ONCE-MAGICAL HOME, MOURNING HIS LOSSES. His wife. His daughter. His grandson. His left hand.

It is the spring of 2004, in a village in eastern Afghanistan. Marcus Caldwell, son of Christian missionaries, met his future wife, a beautiful and intelligent Afghani girl named Qatrina, at their London medical school. To marry her he converted to Islam. Years later, he tells a visitor from Russia that Quatrina brought him Afghanistan in her dowry.

If it’s possible to love a country which has rewarded your devotion by consuming all that you’ve cherished, Marcus still loves Afghanistan. Why else does he stay on when he could leave? Inertia, perhaps. And his obsession with finding his grandson, child of his dead daughter, Zameen—who may yet be alive.

Enter Lara Petrovna, a widow from St. Petersburg, in search of her brother, Benedikt. The trail ends at Marcus’s house, in the village of Usha, 13,000 feet below the mighty mountains that house the caves of Tora Bora. Once a soldier in the Soviet army that invaded Afghanistan in 1979, precipitating much of its contemporary destruction, Benedikt is dead. Lara knows this but is bent on finding out his fate. That fate, it turns out, was inextricably connected with Zameen’s. Marcus’s grandson is Benedikt’s child, fruit of the rape that he perpetrated on Zameen. What eventually happened to Benedikt—what Lara has travelled from Russia to discover—is so awful, so barbaric, that I can’t bear to write it down, although I’m certain that I will never forget it.

The Wasted Vigil is a harrowing novel about our times in which convoluted horrors, betrayals, and crimes pile up on one another. Now it reads like an espionage novel, then like a dramatization of the geopolitics of the region over the last twenty-five years (“a quarter-century of warfare: a period during which some vultures in Afghanistan have developed a taste for human flesh—whenever there was a dead animal with a human corpse next to it they’d ignore the animal”), at other moments like a meditation upon ends and means.

What makes a failed state a failure and who to blame for it? Before the Taliban stoned her almost to death, leaving her to be eaten alive by maggots, Qatrina used to rail that “the cause of the destruction of Afghanistan … is the character and society of the Afghans, of Islam.” But even after her death, Marcus can’t help but be fair-minded. “The West was involved in the ruining of this place, in the ruining of my life. There would have been no downfall if this country had been left to itself by those others.”

Born in Pakistan, Nadeem Aslam was brought up in England where he still lives. His two previous novels won both praise and prizes. It would be very surprising if The Wasted Vigil were not on next year’s Booker short list. Based on both literary merit and timeliness, it’s essential reading.

Elaine Kalman Naves is a Montreal writer.