The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad
Just after the fall of the Taliban regime, the author, an award-winning Norwegian journalist, lived for three months in Afghanistan with Sultan Khan, a middle class bookseller, and his family. What emerged from her intimate association with this family is a book that reads almost like a novel, so riveting is the account of life in post- Taliban Afghanistan.
The author's report paints a fairly grim picture of a society fraught with ignorance and corruption. It is a society where women are merely chattel with little or no say in their future. Education is almost non-existent, and what little there is is routinely denied to the feminine gender. It is also particularly surprising, as well as ironic, that Sultan Khan, being a bookseller and purporting to love books, denies even his sons an education.