A Thousand Splendid SunsA Novel

The brutally heartbreaking, wonderfully uplifting followup to The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini's follow-up to The Kite Runner is every bit as heartbreaking and breathtaking as Margaret Atwood's feminist dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale. Except more so, since it's grounded in the real, horrible, beautiful world. A Thousand Splendid Suns concerns the lives of two Afghani women trapped in a system that always seems to top itself when it comes to social and political injustices. Mariam, living with the "shame" of having been conceived out of wedlock, is sold into marriage at 15. Laila marries at a similarly young age, after losing her parents and soul mate to one of the many bombings that seem to overtake their otherwise quiet existences like flash floods. For Laila and Mariam, merely weathering the storms becomes a noble and heroic undertaking. Mariam's mother warned her from an early age: "Women like us, we endure. It's all we have." Still, for reasons you'll want to discover for yourself, there are moments in this book — and places in this battered country — that are totally, wonderfully uplifting.