“I just hope they will not burn the school. The Taliban is back, and in recent months they have burnt down a dozen girls' schools.”

&#197sne Seierstad knows what she is talking about. The school she is concerned with is the one they are building in Afghanistan with the proceeds from her best-selling book, The Bookseller of Kabul.

Burning books and burning schools are powerful images. A journalist who can get behind them and communicate their effects on ordinary people is worth finding out more about.

&#197sne Seierstad lets us hear the voices of ordinary people caught up in tragic events; opening a window on the society they live in. She speaks simply and directly about the real effects of war and oppression. She creates that human connection which a thousand pictures of burkas and bullets fail to make.

When asked about her choice of profession – she became a war reporter at the age of 26 – she says simply “I have this great urge to find out exactly what is happening to people. I think it is important to get down to the personal level”

In her own country, Norway, &#197sne Seierstad is an icon. Since going to Chechnya in 1995, she has been their main interpreter of every major conflict – Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq. She was the only Scandinavian journalist left in Baghdad as the tanks rolled in. Tall, blonde and seemingly fearless, her striking presence is matched by unique reporting. She talks about the humdrum detail of individual lives. She brings to life the young girl who can no longer go to school because of lawlessness in the streets, and the soundman risking his life to provide power for her broadcast.

Now with the success of her book The Bookseller of Kabul, it looks like Seierstad will achieve fame outside of Scandinavia.

After September 11, Seierstad went as a war reporter to Afghanistan with the Northern alliance. In Kabul, she became acquainted with the bookseller Sultan Khan. Khan had been imprisoned by the communists, and had his books burnt by the Taliban. She visited his bookshop on several occasions and enjoyed her conversations with this well-read man. He in turn invited her home to meet his family, and during that visit the idea of writing a book came about. The book would be about one unusual Afghan family. “I did not choose my family because I wanted it to represent all other families, but because it inspired me” she says in the book's introduction.

Somewhat to her surprise, the bookseller agrees to her suggestion, and Seierstad moves in. For four months, she sleeps on the floor in a room shared with six other women and children. She travels illegally to Pakistan with the bookseller, accompanies his eldest on pilgrimage, visits the police station and the prison; but spends most of her time observing the restricted lives of the women – often from the inside of her own burka.

The result is a book where the Khan family tells their stories. Why does she think the book has hit such a nerve?