Yasmina Khadra is actually the nom de plume of Algerian army officer Mohammed Moulessehoul -- who took on the feminine pseudonym to avoid submitting his manuscripts for approval by military censors while he was still in the army. Yasmina Khadra s Kabul is hell on earth, a place of hunger, tedium, and stifling fear, observes J. M. Coetzee, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature.