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Raised in the thoroughly English upper-middle class community of Tunbridge Wells, Saira Shah first came to know her homeland through a web of stories, woven into her imagination by her gifted and passionate father. Indeed, her book is essentially a memoir of how Afghanistan became real for her—and not merely the composite of her father's stories—through her extensive reporting, beginning with covert cross-border trips during the Soviet occupation.

It's a fine book, richly reported and well written. But there is something lacking. For one thing, Shah's journey to self-discovery is simply not as interesting as the Afghan people, whose travails as recounted here often seem to be mere props for her inner life. This is a story of cross-cultural conflict, of a young woman attempting to find her identity in a multi-cultural world; and while such stories can be valuable, they are increasingly predictable—the genre is in danger of exhaustion. Reading Shah, I wanted more Seirstad. I wanted, in other words, an unsparing, detailed evocation, not of a single life but of a family life, a life in a land beset with woe and trouble, in a culture as far from mine as it is possible to imagine and yet as familiar, in the elemental human way, as the city where I live.

Albert Louis Zambone, a D.Phil candidate at the University of Oxford, lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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The Bookseller of Kabul is available from Amazon.com and other book retailers.

The publisher offers a sample chapter.

The Storyteller's Daughter available from Amazon.com and other book retailers.

The publisher offers an excerpt and an interview with the author.

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November (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47