Post’s foreign correspondent and award-winning author Pamela Constable has spent the better part of two decades traversing global trouble spots, clocking more time in combat zones than most professional soldiers while reporting on societies struggling with dictatorship and desperate poverty, revolution and religious strife. As she was reaching an age when many women would be sending their children off to college. Constable packed up her own life and signed on for a four-year stint in South Asia as the Post’s bureau chief. With lyrical prose and trenchant analysis, Fragments of Grace follows Constable as she deciphers the obscure realities of the region’s political turmoil and ethnic and religious rivalries, while also reflecting on why she forsook a life of comfort for peripatetic truth-seeking quests in far-flung, dangerous lands. Constable’s book contains countless startling and poignant dispatches from South Asia: stern Islamic clerics who rail against decadent Western music have never heard of Beethoven; a Pakistani woman whose jealous husband carved off her face in the name of Islamic honour; a dying man saved by Lord Hanuman after the most modern medical clinic in New Delhi failed to revive him; a Nepalese shelter for young girls freed from sexual bondage; and Sri Lankan censors attempting to limit an American journalist’s press freedom. Constable never found the time to develop an exhaustive expertise on nuclear doctrine, Islam, or Hinduism, but along the way she learned lessons that transcend time and place, recognizing universal patterns of human need and response in locales that bear little resemblance to each other. She combines elements of memoir, travelogue, political history, and social critique in her quest to discover human dignity and hope in the lives of anonymous people struggling to survive in places that seem godforsaken. Compelling and inspirational, the narrative follows one woman’s search through the ruins for fragments of grace. Pamela Constable has been covering South Asia for the Washington Post since 1999, spending four years as the region’s bureau chief. She is the co-author with Arturo Valenzuela of a Nation of Enemies: Chile Under Pinochet. She has been awarded an Allice Patterson Fellowship and the Maria Moors Cabot Prize and recently completed her tenure as journalist-in residence at the Pew International Journalism Programme at John Hopkin’s University School of Advanced International Studies. Constable is currently based in Kabul, Afghanistan.