How do you live with yourself when you write a book that gives you worldwide fame and fortune, but destroys the life of the family you wrote about and leaves you a pariah in their country? The Bookseller of Kabul was an astonishing book that revealed how an Afghan bookseller who had become a rare hero, risking his life to save precious books from burning by the Taliban, was at home a domestic tyrant who oppressed his wives and denied education to his sons.

I was one of those who gave the book a rave review, in these pages, describing it as “a compelling read” and “an intimate portrait of Afghan people quite unlike any other book”. But I was unsettled by certain aspects. Its author, Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad, had taken the hospitality of Shah Mohammed Rais, staying with his family for five months, then torn the man apart. How had she reconstructed these conversations when she did not speak Dari? And the sons she wrote of as being treated as their father’s slaves were going to college, contrary to what she had written.

When I later met Seierstad and asked her about this, she replied evasively that she had never expected the book to do so well (it became Norway’s top-selling nonfiction book in history, translated into 26 languages), which left me wondering about the line between reportage and imagination.

This made me uncomfortable reading The Angel of Grozny, where once more there is a wealth of wonderful detail of events and conversations she learnt about third hand.

But this time, Seierstad has been sure to do things properly, pointing out in the acknowledgements that she sent the main characters the sections about them to ensure they had no objections. And one can only admire the incredible dedication and bravery of a reporter, who has no more need to earn a living and nothing left to prove, in going undercover in Chechnya, of all places. In doing so, she has produced the best book in English about one of the world’s most brutal and under-reported conflicts.

Moscow’s blackout on media coverage meant that so little was known about Russia’s dirty war of 1994-96 that Seierstad admits she did not even know how to spell Chechnya when she first heard about it in 1995. She was lodging with a Russian family in a grim Moscow flat, watching the news on a black-and-white television and trying to make a living at the age of 24 freelancing for the Norwegian press.

Once resolved to find out more, as she writes it, she just talked her way onto a Russian military plane and rocked up in Grozny. At the airport she met two German reporters on their way out, who looked stunned by what they had seen and warned her: “Go back to Moscow. This place is Hell.”

But Seierstad is not easily daunted. Despite the risk — she narrowly avoided being raped by a Russian soldier — she spent most of the next year reporting on the war in the breakaway republic from the viewpoint of Chechen families and fighters.

After that she moved on to other wars but, as she put it, Chechnya had “got under her skin” and in 2006 she decided to go back, slipping across the border illegally.

In the Chechen capital, she stayed in an orphanage run by a woman called Hadijat — the “angel of Grozny”. Left unable to have children of her own by a terrible car accident in Siberia, Hadijat now mothers a flock of traumatised street children.

The resulting book, the Angel of Grozny, is about both Seierstad’s first experience of war and her return to the brutalised land a decade later. Filled with terrible stories of “children who have lost their parents and parents who have lost their children”, it is a story told very much from the Chechen point of view.

Among those she interviews is an old man who, as a child, was a victim of Stalin’s ethnic cleansing in February 1944, when Moscow tried to deport the entire Chechen population on the basis that they might fight on the German side in the war. Chechens were rounded up and transported in coal wagons to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, leaving almost a third of the population dead. Many froze to death, others died of typhus and starvation. Those who survived were allowed home only in 1956, after Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalinism.

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