A Thousand Splendid Suns
SynopsisPlot
Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, loss, and by fate. As they endure the ever-escalating dangers around them-in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul-they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end, it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival.
Story
About this book
Khaled Hosseini's second novel follows two Afghan women, Mariam and Laila, born a generation apart and shaped by very different circumstances. Mariam grows up on the outskirts of Herat as the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy man, while Laila is raised in Kabul by educated parents who encourage her schooling. War, loss, and domestic violence eventually force these two women into the same household, where their initial distrust slowly gives way to a bond that carries qualities of both sisterhood and a mother-daughter closeness.
The story moves through roughly thirty years of Afghan history, from the final decades of the twentieth century into the early 2000s. Soviet occupation, civil war, the rise of the Taliban, and the arrival of American forces all press directly on the characters' daily lives. Hosseini grounds these large-scale events in small, concrete details: restrictions on women's movement, the closing of schools, the scarcity of food and medicine in Kabul's hospitals. The dangers the two women face exist both in the streets and inside their own home.
Hosseini's previous novel, The Kite Runner, spent years on the New York Times bestseller list. A Thousand Splendid Suns reached the number one position on that same list and continued his focus on Afghan lives shaped by decades of conflict.
