An intimate portrait of life in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban by a veteran Norwegian reporter (and woman). Seierstad focuses her story on Sultan Khan (a pseudonym), a bookseller, and his family. Not the tale of a sympathetic patriarch that she may have imagines imagined, hers is a story of tyranny and where women (with whom she lived) suffer the most. Not exactly fiction and certainly not a travelogue, the 33-year-old Seierstadt (who does not include herself in the story) writes movingly of the interior lives of her characters.  (CAS104, $19.95)