Mariam's childhood outside Herat with her mother Nana, her weekly visits from her father Jalil, her attempt to find Jalil in the city, Nana's suicide, and Mariam's forced marriage to Rasheed at fifteen.

Mariam's first years with Rasheed in Kabul. The initial provisional tolerance of the marriage. Six miscarriages. The degradation that follows each loss. Kabul in the late 1970s and early 1980s — the Soviet invasion, political upheaval. Mariam's life narrows to the walls of one house.

Laila's childhood and adolescence in Kabul during the Soviet-Afghan war and the mujahideen civil war. Her father Babi's belief in education, her mother Fariba's grief for her sons. Her relationship with Tariq. The rocket attack that kills her parents. Her rescue by Rasheed.

Laila enters Rasheed's household. Mariam and Laila's initial rivalry and slow movement toward each other. Aziza's birth. A stranger brings news that Tariq is dead — a lie arranged by Rasheed. The household under early mujahideen rule. Rasheed's favoritism toward Laila and cruelty toward Mariam.

The Taliban takes Kabul in 1996. All the novel's previous oppressions are codified into law: women confined, banned from work, banned from appearing in public without a male escort, banned from education. Aziza is placed in an orphanage. Rasheed's shoe shop burns. His violence intensifies. Mariam and Laila form a plan to escape that fails.

Rasheed begins strangling Laila. Mariam picks up a shovel. She kills him. She instructs Laila to take the children and go. She turns herself in to the Taliban. Her execution at Ghazi Stadium. The chapter that ends Mariam's story is the novel's moral and emotional center.

The Taliban falls in 2001. Laila and Tariq — who is alive and finds her — reunite. They marry and raise Aziza and Zalmai in Pakistan, then return to Kabul. Laila works at the orphanage where Aziza spent her Taliban years. She is pregnant with a child she will name Mariam if it is a girl.

Thematic synthesis: the novel's argument about the relationship between private love and public survival. How Mariam and Laila's bond became the only form of resistance available to them — and why Hosseini chooses two women, two generations, one brutal man as his lens for Afghan history.