Kara Kush, subtitled The Gold of Ahmad Shah, is an adventure novel by the Anglo–Afghan writer, thinker and teacher in the Sufi mystical tradition, Idries Shah. In Afghan-Turki, kara kush means "eagle" and in the book this refers to the central character, a resistance leader nicknamed "The Eagle". First published in 1986, it is to be republished in January 2019 by ISF Publishing, including new hardcover and paperback editions. Ebook and audiobook editions of Kara Kush will be produced for the first time. Summary The novel is set in 20th–century Afghanistan during the Soviet–Afghan War, which lasted from 1979 to 1989. It is based on true stories that Shah collected on his travels after secretly entering Afghanistan at the height of the hostilities, to spend time with the Afghan resistance, and find out first-hand what life was like in his ancestral homeland. Shah is quoted in The New York Times as having written the work "because it is a tremendous story which had not been told. I collected this material from freedom fighters, some of them my own relatives, from refugees, and from men and women, fighting shoulder to shoulder, from all over Afghanistan: a country the size of France, full of rich tales of valiant struggle against seemingly impossible odds." Centering on a resistance leader nicknamed "The Eagle", the story also tells of a legendary horde of gold that once belonged to the Afghan king, Ahmad Shah Durrani, that had been located and must be kept secret from the Russian invaders. Idries Shah's father, Ikbal Ali-Shah had himself endeavoured to locate this lost treasure, and Shah's son, Tahir later made a film about his own attempt to find it, titled Search for the Lost Treasure of Afghanistan. Reception Andrew Mole, reviewing Kara Kush in the Adelaide newspaper The Advertiser, found the book a good read, written from an interesting point of view. He agrees with Shah that the Soviets cannot win this war, explaining that this is because there was no centralised resistance at the time. "It is more a case of every man, woman and child having a go at every opportunity," Mole writes. "Instead of fighting one enemy they are fighting endless enemies[,] and destroying one village or battle group does not have the slightest effect on the next." This is something that most outsiders "gloss over", Mole says. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, novelist M.E.