A Thousand Splendid Suns

Mariam grows up outside Herat, the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy businessman, Jalil, who visits her and her embittered mother Nana only occasionally and never publicly acknowledges her. When Mariam is fifteen, a promised outing with her father falls through, and she comes home to find her mother has hanged herself; Jalil's legitimate family quickly marries Mariam off to Rasheed, a much older Kabul shoemaker whose early courtesy curdles into violence once Mariam, after seven miscarriages, fails to give him a son. Decades later, after a rocket kills her parents during the Afghan civil war, a teenage neighbor named Laila, pregnant by her fled boyfriend Tariq and falsely told he has died, is taken in and then married by the same Rasheed. Mariam and Laila despise each other at first, then form the only real alliance either woman has, raising Laila's daughter Aziza together and enduring Rasheed's escalating cruelty as the Taliban take Kabul and strip women of nearly every public freedom. When Tariq reappears alive, having been kept from Laila by a lie Rasheed paid for, Rasheed beats Laila savagely; Mariam kills him with a shovel to stop it, then surrenders herself to Taliban justice so Laila, Tariq and the children can escape. She is executed. Laila's family eventually returns to a Kabul freed from Taliban rule, where Jalil's son delivers a box Jalil had left for Mariam before his death, money and a letter of regret, which Laila uses to rebuild the orphanage where Aziza once stayed.

Hosseini writes the women's confinement with the same directness he brought to Kabul's streets in his first novel, and the book reads as a fast, emotionally direct account of decades of Afghan history seen entirely through domestic life, its plotting occasionally criticized as soap opera even by reviewers who found the larger story genuinely moving.