Coming Soon

By Rebecca Blumenstein

By Diana Kapp

On Sale: Sep 8, 2026
Page Count: 352 pages
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN-13: 9781538779002

$30.00

$40.00 CAD

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An inside account of the extraordinary effort by The New York Times to evacuate more than 200 Afghans after the fall of Kabul, highlighting four exceptional young women as they forge a new life in America.

Kabul; August 15, 2021: The Taliban were coming.

The world watched in shock: After the longest war in American history, the Taliban swept into Kabul in a morning. Desperation reigned as the US pulled out. Some clung to the wheels of departing airplanes, only to fall to certain death. Reprisal was near-certain for anyone who had worked with Americans.

Marwa, the 21-year-old sister of a Times reporter, was in the vanguard of a fast-modernizing Afghanistan. That morning, she had ironed her pink dress for the first day of medical school. Instead, she had 30 minutes to pack her life into a backpack and flee.

Across the world, Rebecca Blumenstein, a top Times editor, and a determined team scrambled to evacuate Kabul bureau’s Afghan employees and families. After a harrowing two-week ordeal, the FIRST WAVE OF refugees landed in Houston, and became part of the largest wave of refugees since the Vietnam War.

THE LAST FREE WOMEN is an intimate portrait of the journey of four brave young women as they seek to rebuild their lives. Marwa, Maryam, Mursal and Samira try to make the most of their precious freedom in America. They start over — learning English, repeating college and forging identities – while back home, the Taliban bans the education of girls past sixth grade and women from leaving their homes alone.

“Why is it always about the women?” Mursal despairs. Their gripping account wrestles with women’s rights to basic freedoms and aspirations. It is also a meditation on duty – what we owe to those who work with Americans abroad, those who seek freedom, and the humanity that links us all.

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Rebecca Blumenstein spent 22 years at THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, rising to Deputy Editor-in-Chief, before joining THE NEW YORK TIMES in 2017 as Deputy Managing Editor. She served as deputy editor, Publisher’s Office, from February 2021 to May 2022, working closely with NEW YORK TIMES Publisher A.G. Sulzberger to support the paper’s rapidly growing journalism operations. In 2023, she moved to NBC, where she is President, Editorial, of NBC News. She was named chair of the board of the Columbia Journalism Review in August 2022, and also serves on the board of the Wallace House/Center for Journalists at The University of Michigan and as a final judge of the Gerald Loeb Awards. She led the team that won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting and received the New York Newswomen’s Award in 1993, the Gerald Loeb Award in 2003, and was named to the Aspen Institute’s Henry Crown Fellowship for 2009. More information is available here: https://www.nbcuniversal.com/leadership/rebecca-blumenstein.

Diana Kapp is a journalist who writes frequently about the intersection of women and modern culture, and has traveled in Afghanistan to report on the education of girls in the country’s rural northern provinces. Her longform pieces have been published in THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE WASHINGTON POST, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, ELLE, MORE, THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, and MARIE CLAIRE, among other publications. She is the author of two YA books profiling female changemakers, GIRLS WHO RUN THE WORLD and GIRLS WHO GREEN THE WORLD. More information is available here: https://dianakapp.com/

Rebecca Blumenstein

About the Author

Rebecca Blumenstein spent 22 years at THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, rising to Deputy Editor-in-Chief, before joining THE NEW YORK TIMES in 2017 as Deputy Managing Editor. She served as deputy editor, Publisher’s Office, from February 2021 to May 2022, working closely with NEW YORK TIMES Publisher A.G. Sulzberger to support the paper’s rapidly growing journalism operations. In 2023, she moved to NBC, where she is President, Editorial, of NBC News. She was named chair of the board of the Columbia Journalism Review in August 2022, and also serves on the board of the Wallace House/Center for Journalists at The University of Michigan and as a final judge of the Gerald Loeb Awards. She led the team that won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting and received the New York Newswomen’s Award in 1993, the Gerald Loeb Award in 2003, and was named to the Aspen Institute’s Henry Crown Fellowship for 2009. More information is available here: https://www.nbcuniversal.com/leadership/rebecca-blumenstein.

Diana Kapp is a journalist who writes frequently about the intersection of women and modern culture, and has traveled in Afghanistan to report on the education of girls in the country’s rural northern provinces. Her longform pieces have been published in THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE WASHINGTON POST, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, ELLE, MORE, THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, and MARIE CLAIRE, among other publications. She is the author of two YA books profiling female changemakers, GIRLS WHO RUN THE WORLD and GIRLS WHO GREEN THE WORLD. More information is available here: https://dianakapp.com/

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