cover image for A Thousand Splendid Suns
Mariam is a harami, an illegitimate child, who only sees her adored father once a week. On those precious days, they go fishing. He reads to her and gives her beautiful presents, but she can never live with him. She decides to visit his home, a visit he does not acknowledge, and returns to find that her mother has hanged herself. Determined that she will not secure a place in their household, her father's wives marry her off to Rasheed, an elderly widower from Kabul, far enough away for Mariam to be safely forgotten. It is a marriage that soon deteriorates into brutality and misery made worse for Mariam by Rasheed’s decision to marry the orphaned Laila.
When Laila disappoints Rasheed by bearing a daughter, she too finds herself a target of his cruelty. But out of this unhappy household grows a friendship which will bind the two women in a union as close as any marriage and which will endure beyond death. Written in often lyrical prose, Khaled Hosseini’s second novel weaves thirty years of turbulent Afghan history through an intensely powerful story of family, friendship and ultimately, hope.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that made me pause as often as A Thousand Splendid Suns did. This book did not just make me catch my breath, but to sit with the weight of the words, the pain of the characters, and the sheer heartbreak of the world Khaled Hosseini describes so vividly.
For a long time, I kept coming across this book on Twitter. People always talked about how raw and emotionally intense it was. The title, A Thousand Splendid Suns, sounded so romantic; like something soft and dreamy. But reading it, I quickly realized how deceivingly beautiful that title was. This wasn’t a love story, not in the way I expected. It was a story about war. About women. About survival, loss, and the kind of strength that comes from being pushed to your absolute limits.
The story is set in Afghanistan, spanning about thirty years (from the Soviet invasion, to the rise of the Taliban, to the post-Taliban era). But it’s not just a political or historical narrative. It’s about how every single explosion, every law and every gunshot affects the lives of everyday people, especially women. It’s about how personal and national tragedies become one and the same.
What struck me the most was how the book focused on female resilience. The two main characters, Mariam and Laila, go through unimaginable pain. And yet, there is so much strength in how they endure, how they love, how they hope, even when everything around them is falling apart. The book touches on so many heavy themes: grief, hope, oppression, love, and loss. But the one that really stayed with me was grief.
Hosseini didn’t just talk about grief as a momentary feeling. He described it as something that lives inside you. Grief is always there, even when it’s quiet. Sometimes, it sleeps, but it never really goes away. It just waits. And when it hits, it hits with a kind of brutality that makes it hard to even see what’s still alive and worth holding on to. That hit deep.
Another thing I realized while reading this book is that the real victims of war aren’t always the soldiers or the ones who fall on the battlefield. Sometimes, it’s the people waiting at home_the mothers, wives, sisters, children_hoping and praying for someone to come back. It’s the innocent lives lost in random bombings and attacks. It’s the people who keep picking up the shattered pieces of their lives, only for them to break all over again.
In the PostScript of his book, Hosseini writes something that I have not been able to forget:
“Women suffered not only through the bombings and indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas like everyone else, not only were beaten and tortured and humiliated and imprisoned, not only had their fundamental human rights violated over and over again, but in large numbers also suffered from gender-based violence.”
That sentence alone carries the weight of everything this book stands for.
Hosseini is brilliant_not just as a writer, but as someone who truly sees. He sees women. He sees pain. He sees beauty in resilience. It takes a lot of emotional depth and empathy to write the way he does, and I applaud him for it. He is a prodigy. His storytelling made me feel the emotions in every page. I cried. I raged. I hoped.
And what’s even sadder is knowing that the story he told isn’t really over. The fight for Afghan women’s rights is still ongoing. An Afghan king named Amanullah tried so much to help the women of Afghan. He banned the wearing of burqa and even tried to ban forced marriage. He raised the minimum age of marriage to sixteen and advocated for education for Afghan women. In the end, he lost the battle as he was exiled from Afghan. In many parts of the world, women are still battling for the most basic human rights. This book reminded me how important it is to keep talking, keep fighting, and keep hoping for a world where every human, regardless of gender, has the right to simply be.
I’d give this book a solid 10/10. It’s raw, poetic, heavy, and deeply human. And in the midst of all the sadness, there’s something quietly uplifting about it too. Because even after all the violence, the loss, and the grief, what remains are the memories and the light people carry for those they’ve lost.
And that light is radiantly beautiful like the glow of a thousand splendid suns.