Found in the phone box library in Kings Stanley, Gloucestershire.

I read this in 2005 when I was going through a phase of reading stuff about and from Afghanistan and really enjoyed it, carried along by a very readable style that combines a strong narrative with plenty of interesting descriptive detail and paints a realistic and often heartbreaking picture of the country and its decline from a developed, sophisticated, cosmopolitan society to one that has become emaciated by poverty, suspicion and tradition. The human cost, not just in lives lost but also in the crushing of individual creativity and ambition, is staggering and I found myself aching to see Afghanistan set free again. Is it right to judge other peoples' cultures by your own standards? Probably not. And yet this book, unlike many that would discuss that issue in a more general way, demonstrates how hard it is to avoid. My attitude towards the eponymous bookseller also changed as the book went on. I won't spoil things by going into all that, but I wonder if that wasn't the case for its author as well. In the end the book is not just about him, 'though. It is a number of peoples' stories, almost a collection of short stories, apart from the fact that they are all bound up with each other. Most of all it is the story of a people who need to be heard, whose lives can teach us much, if we have the ears to hear.

Following a successful trip to the phone box libraries of Stonehouse, Kings Stanley and Leonard Stanley, I'm now restocking my own little library.