A Thousand Splendid Suns

Mariam is “harami” – the bastard daughter of Nana, a domestic servant, and her employer Jalil, a rich businessman with three wives and nine children. Mariam and her mother live in a hut on a mountainside overlooking Herat, she adores her father who visits her from time to time, but her mother warns her he is not to be trusted.

Nor is he. When he breaks his promise to take her into the city on her 15th birthday she goes to find him…and shortly finds herself married to Rasheed, a middle-aged shoemaker in the capital Kabul. At first he seems to care for her – after a fashion, but he turns beast when she has a series of miscarriages and can’t give him the son he wants. Rasheed insists she wears the burqa whenever she goes out and beats her unmercifully.

Laila is the only daughter and youngest child of a family living a few doors down the street, her brothers have joined the Mujahideen and are killed fighting the Russians. She is barely 15 when her boyfriend, Tariq and his family flee to Pakistan. Shortly afterwards, Taliban rockets destroy her home, and killing her parents; Rasheed takes her in, takes care of her and marries her, but turns against her, too, when she has a daughter.

Suffering creates a bond of friendship between Mariam and Laila, to the point where Mariam lays down her own life to save the younger wife who is reunited with her childhood sweetheart.

This is the barest outline of a novel that ends hopefully but, reading the latest news from Afghanistan, one wonders for how long? A Thousand Splendid Suns is a deeply moving book, an epic tragedy of the struggle to survive, to find some degree of happiness in a world gone mad.

You’ll find this extraordinary book at Nigel Khan, Bookseller outlets, nationwide.