The Kabul bookseller who inspired an international bestseller has accused its Western author of offering a grossly distorted view of Afghan culture.

Shah Muhammad Rais was the thinly disguised inspiration behind The Bookseller of Kabul, a literary sensation that claimed to expose the brutal mistreatment of Afghan women by their misogynist husbands.

A bestseller recommended by Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan, it helped to launch the spectacular writing career of Asne Seierstad, at the time a little-known Norwegian freelance journalist.

Her 2003 account was based on the time that she spent in a cramped Kabul home with Mr Rais, his two wives and their children in the turbulent months after the fall of the Taleban, a portrait of a brave but deeply flawed man.

Fascinated Western readers were told how he ruled tyrannically at home and snubbed his first wife of 30 years by effectively purchasing a teenage bride, and learnt of what Seierstad claimed were deeply shameful family secrets.

Mr Rais has always furiously, but rather impotently, denied the portrayal of him. Finally, like any good Afghan with a grievance, he has found a way to take his revenge.

The real-life bookseller of Kabul has written his own account of his life, in which he accuses Seierstad of abusing his hospitality, telling lies about his family and offering a gruesomely distorted view of Afghan culture to the outside world.

Now he is looking for a British publisher for his riposte — Once Upon a Time There was a Bookseller in Kabul — if he can find one ready to brave one of the literary world’s more unlikely feuds.

Mr Rais — known as Shah M — is a Kabul institution who for 30 years has sold books to a city that even in its grimmest times has prized the written word.

In his time he has been persecuted by the Afghan version of the KGB, looted by militiamen and pushed around by the Taleban’s religious police, who used marker pens to scribble over “un-Islamic” photos on the covers of his precious volumes.

But he said that nothing had enraged or humiliated him like Seierstad’s book, which he claimed was full of distortions that shamed his family and put them at risk of attacks by vengeful relatives.

The book claimed that one of his sons had lured a beggar girl into his shop for sex and described how an “honour” killing within the family was covered up — the latter a lurid disclosure that was plastered over the Kabul press, making Mr Rais a figure of scorn. He does not deny that it happened but he says that it had been kept quiet to avoid putting his family at risk of revenge attacks by relatives who had not known of the killing.

Mr Rais claims that both of his wives have been so fearful of attack that they were driven into exile, the first to Canada, the second to Norway. Each has successfully claimed asylum. He also claims that his children were put in danger.

Ever since The Bookseller of Kabul was published Mr Rais has hounded Seierstad, making repeated trips to Norway to denounce her integrity and confronting her at emotional meetings. Last year he denounced her in front of her own family when they invited him to dinner. He is also attempting to pursue a legal case for defamation.

Mr Rais said: “This has been a very difficult time for me and it has hurt my family terribly. I am alone now. My wives and children have had to go far away to safety.

“But I will never give up. I will make a very strong stand against her for the honour of my people. She told the rest of the world that the Afghans are barbarians, but she was only in Kabul for a few weeks and she never really tried to understand our culture.”

Seierstad, 37, who now lives in Oslo, stands by the veracity of her Kabul book. She went on to write a second bestselling book about her time in Baghdad.

She said: “I wrote my book, he wrote his. That is fine, and the reader can judge.”

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