The Bookseller of Kabul

I casually picked this book off the bookshelf, and found the first chapter timeless and charming.  It could have happened almost anywhere in the world at any time in history. The second chapter by contrast is brutal, and fixed in place and time. Kabul under the Taliban.
Most of the book takes place after the Taliban have left, and life gets back to a rather bleak shadow of better times that can still be remembered. The bookseller can get back to openly selling all the books that were banned during the Taliban, books that told of the county's ancient history the Taliban soldiers neither knew nor cared about.  He was proud of that history and prepared to suffer to preserve its memory.
The story is not so much about the bookseller, as of his family. The individual stories of different members of the family are told from their point of view.   We see a wedding, a pilgrimage to another part of Afghanistan, a neighbourhood chat, a trip the school, younger members of the family running smaller shops and kiosks, the womenfolk visiting the public baths, and brushes with officialdom and police.  On the way we pick up an idea about Afghan customs and values.
As you would expect, there is quite bit about what life is like for women in an traditional Islamic society, recently reinforced by the Taliban. But there is a young man and young lad in the family as well, and their stories, and the pressures they are under get told as well.
The bookseller himself becomes a rather remote figure, with a strong influence over every aspect of the family members lives, even when he is not there. The more heroic figure he cuts in the second chapter seems to have been forgotten.
This was apparently the experience of the author Asne Seierstad. For this is not a novel, as I thought when I read it. This journalist was so impressed by the book seller that she arranged to stay with the family to learn more about Afghan culture. I don't suppose it is a factual account either, but it does give a flavour of a family and society struggling to recover during a bleak period of their history.  It is also a good read, if somewhat bleak at points.