T he author Åsne Seierstad’s cool, shaded garden, within walking distance from the centre of Oslo, seems a very long way from Afghanistan and the Taliban. But sitting there, drinking tea, she brings a vivid sense of that other dustier, more chaotic world alive. That relationship began for Seierstad two weeks after 9/11, when, as a freelance foreign correspondent, she embedded herself with the Northern Alliance of forces that, with western support, would sweep the Islamic fundamentalist regime from power.
Twenty years later, she has been among the few journalists to go back after the desperate airlift that ended US and British support for democratic government and to spend time bearing witness to the Taliban’s chilling return to power. Her history is bookended by two intimate reports of the lives of families living through those decades of conflict and fear. The first, The Bookseller of Kabul , became a bestseller around the world.
That book was more than just a literary sensation, however. It became – after the bookseller on whom the book was based sued Seierstad in Norway for defamation and invasion of privacy – a decade-long test case for all sorts of things: not least of the rights of writers to use other people’s lives as material. Her second book, The Afghans , to be published this month, is a kind of sequel (“More a stepbrother or a cousin,” she says) to that first book.
Through three separate, intimate portraits, it offers a window on the present moment.
