Book Review on a Thousand Spledid Suns

Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, and moved to the United States in 1980. His first novel, The Kite Runner, was an international bestseller, published in 34 countries. In 2006 he received the Humanitarian Award from the United Nations Refugee Agency and was named a U.S. goodwill envoy to that agency.

Told through the alternating voices of two women, the story spans the turbulent period from the 1970s to post-9/11. The story is set mainly in the city of Kabul and its culture are as integral to the story as the relationship between the two women, Mariam and Laila, and their abusive husband, Rashid.

Mariam is the illegitimate daughter of a prosperous Herat businessman. Banished to a small hut outside of town, Mariam and her mother live in impoverished seclusion. Mariam's father, Jalil, makes periodic visits bearing gifts and visions of a wider world. Mariam comes to idolize her father, though her mother warns repeatedly against trusting him.

Wanting desperately to be a part of his family, Mariam flees her mother and her desolate life at 15, traveling to her father's home in Herat. Disaster results, thrusting her onto a path of hardship she endures for the rest of her life.

After arriving at the family home in Herat, Mariam is rejected by her father and his family. Very quickly, she's forced to marry Rashid, a shoemaker from Kabul, a much older man, one she "smelled before she saw him." Though traumatized by the turn her life has taken, she attempts to adapt herself to her life as a wife living in a new city.

Though the couple are poor, a new world of wonders that is Kabul of the 1970s opens for Mariam. She tastes ice cream for the first time. She glimpses what Rashid calls modern women, "their lips as red as tulips," wearing dark sunglasses, carrying swinging handbags, who "walked in high heels and quickly, as if on perpetually urgent business." For a time, the marriage seems to be taking hold, but soon enough Rashid's brutish nature emerges.

Parallel to Mariam's story is that of Laila. The beautiful, vivacious 14-year-old daughter of a schoolteacher father who dreams of going to California and a somewhat preoccupied mother, Laila lives a life filled with books, schooling and hope for the future. But as the war between the Pashtun and Hazaras forces ravages Kabul during the summer of 1992, Laila is thrown together with Mariam when a bomb blast ruptures both their lives.