Rais Shah Muhammad

“The real-life bookseller of Kabul Rais Shah Muhammad has signed a deal to sell books into the UK and beyond,” reports Catherine Neilan in a Bookseller story. She says the deal will include the sale of Muhammad’s “own memoir of life in Afghanistan, penned as a riposte to Asne Seierstad’s 2003 bestselling The Bookseller of Kabul.” (See the earlier MobyLives report.)

The deal is about more than bookselling. As Neilan clarifies, “Muhammad is both a bookseller and a publisher, and operates three shops — and one mobile shop — in the Afghan capital selling English and local-language titles.” Muhammad will now be working with Indian book distributor Motilal Books “to bring between 200 and 500 of his locally-published titles to the UK.”

Motilal’s Raymond McLennan says, “I want to support his bravery and fortitude. Booksellers here in the UK are concerned about the economy of selling books — but we all take the freedom of selling books for granted.” Neilan reports Motilal will “be approaching groups like Blackwell’s, Dawson, Starkman to gauge interest, and he would put the more commercial titles with Bertrams and Gardner, and everything would go on Amazon.co.uk.”