The Storyteller's Daughter by Saira Shah<br></br>The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad, trans. Ingrid Christopherson

Two brave women report from shattered Afghanistan on life before, and after, the Taliban. Caroline Moorehead explores the hidden world behind the burqa

When the first five busloads of refugees were returned by the UN to Iraq at the end of July, those on board, who had begged to go home, were interviewed by Western journalists. Why were they in such a hurry to return? Why not wait until it was safer? Some explained that they had families they needed to trace, others wanted to reclaim houses and land. Then a man spoke up. "We had to come," he said. "It is like the soul coming home."

This huge longing to go home, to fill the terrible void of exile, is at the heart of the stories of the two million or so Afghans who have been pouring back into Afghanistan from Iran and Pakistan since the Taliban fled 18 months ago. It is also the central theme of Saira Shah's The Storyteller's Daughter, her account of her travels in Afghanistan in search of her own and her family's past. Part memoir, part travel diary, part war report, it belongs in the increasingly popular new literature of return, finding its strongest expression among Afghan and Middle Eastern writers.

Saira Shah grew up in Tunbridge Wells, the daughter of Afghans long exiled from their home at Paghman, overlooking Kabul. She was reared on stories, embellished by time and loss, of orchards groaning with fruit, pomegranates with seeds that shone like rubies, and fountains that sparkled in the constant sunshine. As he cooked her huge bowls of pilau, her father would recount tales of the great Persian and Afghan writers and poets. She listened and remembered, and grew up feeling herself to be two incompatible people, one a sensitive, liberal, pacifist Westerner, the other a "rapacious robber baron" with the greed and impatience of her ancestors.

Her dream was to visit Afghanistan, to see this fabled land, to understand what it meant to belong to it, and fuse her two warring halves. She studied Persian and Arabic at university and took lessons in martial arts; and, to strengthen her nerve, she did a number of parachute jumps.

Clearly both intrepid and determined, Shah did get into Afghanistan, protected by disguises or wearing the all-concealing burqa. She did travel to remote places, enchanted by the beauty of the mountains and light, appalled by the brutality and suffering, listening to the stories of a nation of displaced and afflicted people. She was 17 when she persuaded her family to let her visit relations in Peshawar, living out years of exile in camps and villages along the border; 21 when, disguised as a boy, she travelled with mujahedeen in the Hindu Kush.

Later, in order to make the two television documentaries Behind the Veil and Unholy War, she spent many weeks inside Afghanistan, reporting on the poverty and fear to which Afghans had been reduced by 23 years of war, drought and fundamentalist oppression. Most of her journeys were bold, punishingly uncomfortable and extremely dangerous.

Saira Shah admits that she never found the mythical Afghan paradise. Going home remained an enigmatic business. Like the wandering heroes of the fables of which her book is full, her childhood dreams eluded her. Nor did she fuse her two disparate selves.

And her great love for the beauty of Afghanistan, with its tawny and purple mountains and brilliant skies, was tempered by revulsion at the cruelty and venality she encountered. But her account of her own adventures provides a persuasive and enjoyable look at a country fractured by constant war and buffeted by foreign interests.

Perhaps not surprisingly, The Storyteller's Daughter is full of stories about wearing the hateful burqa, the usually pale-blue veil, with its crocheted panel for eyes and nose. Both Saira Shah and Asne Seierstad, whose The Bookseller of Kabul is based on similar experiences as a war correspondent, speak with particular loathing of its claustrophobia and the way it reduces the world outside to a grid of black shadows.

Asne Seierstad is a well-known Norwegian journalist who, in November 2001, arrived in Kabul with the Northern Alliance to find the city deserted, silent, and in ruins. Wandering through the derelict streets, she met the owner of Kabul's most enduring book shop, Sultan Khan, whose passion for literature and all things Persian and Afghan had taken him repeatedly into prison under the Taliban for selling forbidden books. Looking for a focus for a book of her own, Seierstad proposed that she should write about his life, his shop, his travels in search of books that had escaped the devastation of the war and Taliban, and his complicated family.

In February 2002, just as the aid world descended on Afghanistan with its fleet of white Toyota Land Cruisers, she moved in with Sultan Khan's family, taking with her a computer, a mobile phone, notebooks and a burqa, so that she could move about unperceived. Over the next four months, occupying a role somewhere between honoured guest and visiting relation, she lived, ate, shopped and travelled with Sultan Khan, his two wives and many children, his mother, sisters, nephews and cousins.

Written sometimes more like fiction than fact, borrowing generously from speculation, this is a remarkable portrait, with deftly woven accounts of weddings and journeys, books and bookselling, relations and squabbles, firmly anchored by pleasing details about food and customs, all set against the backdrop of a derelict city, filthy and crammed but not defeated. One of Seierstad's main characters is Leila, Sultan Khan's 19-year-old sister, drudge and maid, whose chances of escaping utter subjugation lie in the improbable hope that a decent man may ask for her hand in marriage, and that her brother may agree to let her leave his kitchen.

Like Saira Shah, Anse Seierstad has strong views about the appalling place of women in Afghan society, but her interest in the family and her skill at describing life inside the burqa are far stronger than her desire to preach. Like Shah, too, she was fascinated by everything she witnessed, and her curiosity and perceptive eye colours every page. It is the picture of Afghanistan itself, in both books, that is depressing: a country corrupted and made destitute by 23 years of constant destruction. Neither she nor Saira Shah offer much hope of a quick recovery.

Caroline Moorehead's biography of Martha Gellhorn will be published in October