A Thousand Splendid Suns
By Khaled Hosseini
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
384 pages
$25.95
#3. A Thousand Splendid Suns
by Khaled
Hosseini
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
384 pages
$25.95
The bestselling literary
novel of the year is also — funny thing — one of the best. Unlike Hosseini's
first novel, The Kite Runner, Suns is set entirely in Afghanistan,
covering the past 30-plus years of Afghan history almost month by month.
Mariam is the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy playboy, forced into a
loveless marriage to the boorish shoemaker Rasheed. Childless, the
couple adopts 14-year-old Laila, who was orphaned by a rocket attack.
Rasheed proceeds to take Laila as a second wife. Confined to a single
claustrophobic household, beaten and denied love and set against each
other, the two women find in each other the things that war and society
and the Taliban have taken away from them. Suns is a dense, rich,
pressure-packed guide to enduring the unendurable.