Synopses & Reviews
With The Bookseller of Kabul, award-winning journalist Asne Seierstad has given readers a first-hand look at Afghani life as few outsiders have seen it.
Invited to live with Sultan Khan, a bookseller in Kabul, and his family for months, this account of her experience allows the Khans to speak for themselves, giving us a genuinely gripping and moving portrait of a family, and of a country of great cultural riches and extreme contradictions. For more than 20 years, Sultan Khan has defied the authorities — whether Communist or Taliban — to supply books to the people of Kabul. He has been arrested, interrogated, and imprisoned, and has watched illiterate Taliban soldiers burn piles of his books in the street. Yet he had persisted in his passion for books, shedding light in one of the world's darkest places. This is the intimate portrait of a man of principle and of his family — two wives, five children, and many relatives sharing a small four-room house in this war ravaged city. But more than that, it is a rare look at contemporary life under Islam, where even after the Taliban's collapse, the women must submit to arranged marriages, polygamous husbands, and crippling limitations on their ability to travel, learn and communicate with others.
Review
"[A]n astounding portrait....Seierstad's visceral account is equally seductive and repulsive...An international bestseller, it will likely stand as one of the best books of reportage of Afghan life after the fall of the Taliban." Publishers Weekly
Review
"A slice of Afghanistan today, rendered with a talent for fine, sobering prose and strange, unnerving settings." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Seierstad does have considerable descriptive powers, making The Bookseller of Kabul a compelling portrait of a country at a crossroads." Boston Globe
Review
"[A] stunning indictment of Afghanistan's treatment of its women....Seierstad's voice is impassioned and her prose clear, direct and unflinching." Providence Journal
About the Author
Asne Seierstad has reported from such war-torn regions as Chechnya, China, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. She has received numerous awards for her journalism. She is the author of A Hundred and One Days as well as The Bookseller of Kabul, an international bestseller that has been translated into twenty-six languages. Seierstad makes her home in Norway and travels frequently to the United States