A Thousand Splendid Suns

The companion novel — the male Afghan perspective on the same historical period. Together they form the most complete literary portrait of Afghanistan available in English

Women surviving in a country being destroyed by outside political forces — the domestic and the geopolitical inseparable, both novels structured around the consequences men's certainty has for women's lives

The extremity of maternal love under systems designed to destroy it — sacrifice as the only available form of protection

State-enforced gender apartheid — Atwood's speculative version of what Hosseini's novel documents as historical fact

A woman's journey through marriages that diminish her toward a life that is finally her own — the structure of female self-determination against patriarchal constraint

Multi-generational female survival, postcolonial political catastrophe as the backdrop for domestic violence, the question of whether guilt can become repair