A Thousand Splendid Suns
Khaled Hosseini (2007)
“Two women in Kabul — born a generation apart, brought together by a cruel man, bound by a love that becomes the most radical act of resistance either can imagine.”
At a Glance
Mariam is an illegitimate child in Herat who is married at fifteen to Rasheed, a Kabul shoemaker decades her senior. Laila is Mariam's young neighbor, orphaned by a rocket attack and married to Rasheed against her will. The two women begin as rivals in Rasheed's household and become each other's salvation. When Rasheed tries to kill Laila, Mariam kills him to save her. Mariam is executed by the Taliban. Laila escapes with her children, eventually returning to Kabul to rebuild a school. The novel is their story — two lives destroyed and rebuilt by the same wars, the same laws, the same man.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
A Thousand Splendid Suns debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list and remained on it for over a year. It sold over four million copies in the first year and has since become one of the bestselling novels of the 21st century. It arrived at a moment — 2007, during the US occupation of Afghanistan — when most Americans had never read a story set in Afghanistan from an Afghan perspective, and it introduced Afghan interiority to a mass audience.
Diction Profile
Formal in narration; colloquial in dialogue; elevated in moments of lyrical significance. Farsi and Dari terms embedded without translation — 'harami,' 'bibi,' 'jan,' 'kaka' — taught through context.
Moderate