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Set internationally and spanning two decades, Kathleen's most recent published novel, ANNISA - DAUGHTER OF AFGHANISTAN, is an intricate portrait of a young Afghan girl's struggle to survive after the Soviet invasion in 1979. Her harrowing escape to America, and her fatal decision to return to her people in Afghanistan, evokes insight into a society torn apart by terrorism, drug smuggling, and bitter conflicts over the role of its women. Her friendship with a Russian deserter and a volunteer American doctor dramatizes the different forces in her life. But it is her love for a captain in the Afghan army that drives her. The novel ends with the bitter events of 9/11, and the role Annisa's fundamentalist and Western-educated brother may have played in that tragedy.

Kathleen's memoir on her life in Afghanistan, SPIES BEHIND THE PILLARS, BANDITS AT THE PASS, was touted by The New Yorker as a book worth reading for its fresh and clear-eyed perceptions of a fascinating land and people. As a reporter for the Kabul Times and the wife of a Foreign Service Officer, the author had first-hand insight into the complexities of Afghan society as it existed before the Soviet invasion.

Although ANNISA is fictional, many of the incidents included in the book are true stories of Afghan refugees that Mrs. MacArthur interviewed once they escaped to the west. Excerpts from ANNISA have appeared in The Afghan Studies Journal at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

A former speech writer on Capitol Hill, Kathleen MacArthur served as a foreign policy adviser for U.S. Senator John Sherman Cooper during the Vietnam War and later as Press Secretary for the U.S. Congressional Joint Economic Committee under Senators Hubert H. Humphrey and Lloyd Bentsen. She left Congress to continue her studies in English Literature at Oxford University in England. Born in Wichita, Kansas, Mrs. MacArthur has lived overseas in France, Afghanistan, Singapore, and England and currently resides with her husband in Savannah, Georgia and in Monpazier in the Dordogne area of France.