Patricia McArdle is a retired American diplomat. Her debut novel "Farishta", which won the 2010 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Grand Prize for General Fiction, was inspired by events that occurred during the year she spent in northern Afghanistan with a British Army unit. From 1979-2006 she worked overseas and in Washington D.C. as a member of the U.S. diplomatic corps. Before joining the Department of State she served for three years as one of the first two female Naval Officers at a remote U.S. communications base in Morocco. Prior to her military service, she spent two years as the only Peace Corps volunteer in a small village in central Paraguay.