A Thousand Splendid Suns

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A Thousand Splendid Suns
First edition cover
Author	Khaled Hosseini
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Novel
Publisher	Riverhead Books(and Simon & Schuster audio CD)
Publication date	May 22, 2007
Media type	Print (Hardcover & Paperback) and audio CD
Pages	384 pp (first edition, hardcover)
ISBN	ISBN 978-1-59448-950-1 (first edition, hardcover)

A Thousand Splendid Suns (Persian:دو صد خورشیدرو) is a 2007 novel by American author Khaled Hosseini, his second, following his bestselling debut, The Kite Runner (2003). The book was released on May 22, 2007, and received favorable prepublication reviews from Kirkus,^[1] Publishers Weekly^[2], Library Journal,^[3] and Booklist, as well as reaching #2 on Amazon.com's bestseller list before its release.

Columbia Pictures owns the movie rights to the novel, but production has yet to begin; Steven Zaillian is currently writing a screenplay.^[4]

1 Plot
2 Characters
3 Critical reaction
4 Footnotes
5 External links

[edit] Plot

The novel is divided into four parts. The first part focuses exclusively on Mariam, the second and fourth parts focus on Laila, and the third part switches focus between Mariam and Laila with each chapter.

[edit] Part One

The novel opens with the introduction of Mariam, a girl growing up in a small village on the outskirts of Herat in western Afghanistan. She lives with her mother, Nana, an embittered woman who is frequently resentful of her daughter whom she bore out of wedlock. Mariam busies herself with lessons in reading and writing from Mullah Faizullah, an elderly, kind-hearted cleric, and weekly visits from her wealthy father, Jalil. Mariam has heard of her father's other wives and children, who live with him at his lavish home in Herat, but has never visited them due to the stigma of her being an illegitimate child.

On her fifteenth birthday, Mariam asks her father to take her to see Pinocchio at the movie theater that he owns. When Jalil fails to come, Mariam travels to Herat and goes to her father's house in person. Jalil refuses to see her, and she ends up sleeping outdoors on the porch.

In the morning, Mariam returns home to find that her mother has hanged herself out of fear that her daughter has deserted her. Mariam goes to live in her father's house, where she feels isolated and spends most of her time alone in her room. Jalil and his wives quickly arrange for her to be married to an older widower named Rasheed, who is a middle-class shoemaker in Kabul.

In Kabul, Mariam begins adjusting to her new life as the wife of a man she barely knows. Mariam soon becomes pregnant, and Rasheed, having lost his own son in a drowning accident years earlier, hopes for a boy. When Mariam suffers a miscarriage, her marriage takes a turn for the worse; Rasheed is no longer cordial to her, and verbally and physically abuses her.

[edit] Part Two

Down the street from Rasheed and Mariam lives Laila, the beautiful, bright young daughter of ethnic Tajik parents - Hakim, a progressive-minded high school teacher, and Fariba, who mourns the loss of her two sons, who were mujahideen fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

After the victory of the Mujahedeen, civil war comes to Afghanistan, and Kabul is bombarded by rocket attacks. During this time, Laila and her best friend since childhood, Tariq, begin a secret relationship. Tariq's family eventually decides to leave Kabul, and the emotional farewell between Laila and Tariq culminates in their sleeping together on the floor of Laila's living room.

Seventeen days after Tariq's departure, Laila's family also decides to leave Kabul, but as they are packing, a rocket destroys the house and kills her parents.

[edit] Part Three

While recovering in Rasheed and Mariam's home, Laila learns of Tariq's death from a man who was in the hospital with him. After recovering from her injuries, including slight deafness in one ear, Laila discovers she is pregnant with Tariq's child. To avoid the stigma of being an unwed mother, Laila agrees to marry Rasheed, who is only too eager to have a young and attractive second wife, and immediately consummates the marriage in hopes that she can pass the child off as his. She gives birth to Tariq's daughter, Aziza, and Rasheed abandons his initially friendly behavior towards Laila.

After an initially rancorous relationship, Mariam and Laila eventually become confidantes. They plan to run away from Rasheed and leave Kabul for Peshawar, Pakistan, but they are betrayed at the bus station by a man they thought they could trust, arrested and returned to Rasheed. Rasheed beats the two women and deprives them of water for several days, almost killing Aziza.

A few years later, Laila gives birth to Zalmai, Rasheed's son. By this time, the Taliban has risen to power in Afghanistan. They have banned television, movies and books other than the Koran, and women are not allowed to work, wear fashionable clothes, or even to wear nail polish. They have also made it difficult (if not impossible) for women to get medical attention, resulting in the family having to travel some distance to find a hospital to admit Laila when she goes into labor. Moreover, the complications ensuing from the labor and the fact that the Taliban has essentially prevented any funding or basic supplies from getting to the women's hospital means that the doctor has to perform a Caesarean section in order to deliver Zalmai, and that Laila has to endure the procedure without any kind of anaesthetic, because the hospital literally has none to give her.

After Zalmai is born, a drought sets in, which eventually leads to widespread hunger and food shortages. When Rasheed's shop burns down, the family is thrust into destitution. There is little food and Rasheed finds himself reduced to working as a porter at a hotel. As their financial situation worsens, Aziza is sent to an orphanage several kilometers away. Laila tries to visit her whenever she can, but of course she needs a man to come with her. Rasheed accompanies her a few times in the beginning but after a while, says it is too hard, and he refuses to. Laila tries to go by herself and is sometimes beaten by the Taliban because she is not with a man, and when she sneaks past them and gets to see Aziza, when she gets home she is beaten by Rasheed.

Then one day, Tariq appears outside the house (it is realized that Rasheed paid the man who told Laila that Tariq was dead). He and Laila are reunited, and Tariq explains how he and his parents became refugees in Pakistan, his parents dying from disease and Tariq sentenced to seven years' imprisonment for drug smuggling. He further tells Laila of how he has found a home and employment at a hotel near Rawalpindi. Later, when Rasheed returns home from work, Zalmai tells his father about the visitor. Rasheed starts to savagely beat Laila with his belt and strangle her, but Mariam comes to Laila's defense by killing Rasheed with a shovel.

Mariam tells Laila to leave Kabul with Tariq, Aziza, and Zalmai. Laila initially refuses to leave without Mariam and begs her to come, but ultimately, she and Tariq take the children and leave for Pakistan, where they marry and settle down. Mariam turns herself in to the Taliban, confesses to killing Rasheed, and is executed.

[edit] Part Four

In 2003 (almost two years after the fall of the Taliban to NATO forces), Laila and Tariq decide to return to Afghanistan. They stop in the village near Herat where Mariam was raised, and discover a package that Mariam's father had left behind for her: a videotape of Pinocchio, her share of the family inheritance, and a note from Jalil explaining how much regret he felt in marrying her off just to save face. They return to Kabul and fix up the orphanage. The book ends with a reference to them deciding new names for Laila's new baby, but they're only debating male names, because Laila already knows the name if it's a girl. It is implied that the name would be Mariam.

[edit] Characters

Mariam, an ethnic Tajik born in 1959. She is the illegitimate child of Jalil and Nana, and suffers shame throughout her childhood because of the circumstances of her birth.
Nana is Mariam's mother, who used to be a servant in Jalil's house and had an affair with him. She hangs herself when Mariam is fifteen, after she (Mariam) journeys to Jalil's house on her birthday, which Nana perceives to be betrayal.
Mullah Faizullah is Mariam's elderly Koran teacher and friend.
Jalil is Mariam's father, a wealthy man who had three wives before he had an affair with Nana. He marries Mariam to Rasheed after Nana's death, but later regrets sending her away.
Laila is an ethnic Tajik, born in 1978, she is a beautiful and intelligent girl coming from a working class family when first introduced. Her life becomes tied to Mariam's when she is to marry Rasheed as his second wife.
Hakim is Laila's father. He is a well-educated and progressive school teacher. He is killed in a rocket explosion along with Fariba.
Fariba is Laila's mother. In Part One, during her brief meeting with Mariam, she is shown to be cheerful, but her happy nature is brutally disrupted when her two sons, Ahmad and Noor, leave home to go to war and are later killed. She spends nearly all of her time in bed mourning her sons until the Mujahideen are victorious. She is killed in a rocket explosion along with Hakim.
Rasheed is an ethnic Pashtun, a shoemaker, and the antagonist of the novel. He marries Mariam through an arrangement with Jalil, and later marries Laila as well.
Tariq, an ethnic Pashtun, is a boy who grew up in Kabul with Laila. They eventually evolve from best friends to lovers, and are married and expecting a child by the end of the novel.
Aziza is the daughter of Laila and Tariq, conceived when Laila was 14 and causing her to marry Rasheed in very early pregnancy after Tariq and his family decide to leave Kabul.
Zalmai is Laila and Rasheed's son.

[edit] Critical reaction

Time magazine's Lev Grossman named it one of the Top 10 Fiction Books of 2007, ranking it at #3, and praising it as a "dense, rich, pressure-packed guide to enduring the unendurable."^[5]^[6]