A Thousand Splendid Suns

Title: A Thousand Splendid Suns

Author : Khaled Hosseini

Published: 2007

Genre: Fiction

Rating: 4 out of 5

After hearing all the great things about Khaled Hosseini, and being unable to complete 'The Kite Runner', I was able to read 'A Thousand Splendid Suns' at last. The book about love, hate, sacrifice, compromise, revenge, and the rebound has been wonderfully written.

This is a story about two women in Afghanistan, who are married to the same man. The story starts with Mariam, who is 'haraami', an illegitimate daughter to a wealthy man in Herat. Her life as a child and wanting to be with her father makes her leave her home and makes her change her mind when she sees the reality. Laila, another main character in the book, is a daughter of a professor who believes in women's empowerment. Laila has two brothers who become martyrs in the Afghan-Russian war. She is in love with her friend Tariq, who has lost a leg to a landmine. Both Mariam and Laila end up marrying Rasheed, who is a shoe merchant and believes in Taliban rules.

The book illustrates Afghanistan's struggle through the political changes and brutality of a male-dominated society. The life in the refugee camps in Pakistan, the daily struggles of Afghan people make the reader wonder about the living conditions in a war-torn country. 

Favorite lines from the book :

• Learn this now and learn it well, my daughter: Like a compass needle that points north, a man's finger always finds a woman. always. You remember that Mariam.
• A man's heart is wretched, wretched thing, Mariam. It isn't like a mother's womb. It won't bleed, it won't stretch to make room for you.
• He told her of the superstitions people had about shoes: that putting them on a bed invited death into the family, that a quarrel would follow if one put on the left shoe first. "And did you know it is supposed to be a bad omen to tie shoes together and hang them from a nail?"
• Because a society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated Laila. No chance.
• And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion.
• This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate beginnings.
• "I'm sorry," Laila says, marveling at how every Afghan story is marked by death and loss and unimaginable grief. And yet, she sees, people find a way to survive, to go on.