About The Book

Twenty Years Between Home and the World

There is a photograph Shiruzimath Sameer does not have: a young woman standing at the edge of a jetty in Malé in 2006, suitcase in hand, suspended between the person she had been and the person she was about to become.

Carrying the Maldives is the memoir of that journey — twenty years spent representing a small island nation in rooms most people never see. From a classroom in Kuala Lumpur to the Security Council, from the invisible discipline of diplomatic drafting to a posting in Berlin, from a pandemic lockdown in Dhaka to at the United Nations in New York, this is a story told not through ceremony, but through the real texture of the work: the preparation before every meeting, the family separated by distance, the suitcase packed and repacked, always with the same deliberate care.

At its heart, this is also a story about women in diplomacy — and about what it costs, and what it gives, to carry a country while also carrying a family. It is for the young woman who wonders whether a life of purpose is possible for someone like her. It is for anyone who has ever had to leave home to find out who they could become.