A beautiful, expansive memoir on food as a vital bridge between cultures, from the internationally award-winning author of Parwana.
You will find in its pages, an invitation to a retelling of our shared story, through the clues and hints towards vastness and awakening that lay hidden in the ingredients that make our lives.
She Who Tastes, Knows is available to purchase online, through selected book stores and from my supplier of choice, Imprints.
This is a story of how food connects us all – not only at the table but to each other's cultures and histories. Durkhanai Ayubi was born in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and she and her family became refugees when she was a small child. She's grown to see her ancestral lands be misunderstood as a desolate war zone of helpless people, with no history or culture worthy of mention, when the reality is in fact steeped in rich, complex histories of incredible cultural significance.
Living in Australia, Durkhanai's only tangible connection to the histories of her homeland was through food, first through cooking with her family, and then as an owner of her much-loved award-winning Adelaide family restaurant, Parwana. Years on, and following Afghanistan's systemic collapse in 2021, Durkhanai realised that it was time to revisit those histories and tell the previously untold stories that can help shape a more optimistic future.
She Who Tastes, Knows is an expansive history of Durkhanai's homeland and a vivid, moving story about what it truly means to understand another's culture. Through stories of food, family, belonging and migration, the book traverses cultural boundaries, weaving a tapestry of dignity, empathy and understanding. Each chapter draws on a particular ingredient important to Durkhanai's cultural identity, and explores their life cycles to uncover unseen histories of Afghan culture, the complexities of migrant and refugee experience, and how we as a society might work towards unifying our disparate cultures and ways of seeing the world. In our modern world, which can feel so disjointed, this book shows us - with timeless prescience - how new possibilities for connection are just under the surface, waiting to bloom.
Murdoch Books
03 March 2026
Narrated in my own voice, the audiobook of She Who Tastes, Knows carries the rhythms, silences and intimacies that shaped its telling. Through food, exile, ancestral inheritance and the quiet possibilities of reconciliation, I invite you into a listening experience that unfolds as intimately as a shared meal. To hear these stories spoken aloud is to encounter them differently – not only through language, but through breath, pause and the textures of memory that live beneath the words.
Returning to these pages in the recording studio became its own journey. Speaking each sentence aloud asked something different of me than writing it had. There were moments where memories I thought had settled revealed themselves anew, and others where the stories of my family, my ancestors and the landscapes that continue to nourish me felt profoundly present. In giving the book my voice, I found myself listening differently too – to grief and joy, to rupture and reconciliation, and to the quiet abundance that can emerge when we allow ourselves to dwell with what has long remained unseen.
It is my hope that, in listening, you might also discover your own memories stirred. That the stories carried here become less about mine alone, and more an invitation towards the places where our lives, too, overlap and belong to one another.
She Who Tastes, Knows: A Memoir of Food, Exile and Awakening is available from a number of major audiobook retailers and platforms including Audible, Apple Books, Spotify, Google Play and selected libraries.
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