A Thousand Splendid Suns

On the outskirts of Herat, a girl named Mariam lives with her embittered and estranged mother, Nana. Mariam's father, Jalil, is a businessman who owns a cinema and lives in Herat with his three wives and nine children, but his affair with Mariam's mother led to him sweeping her under the rug by building her a small hut outside of the city, relegating her to it. Nana resents Jalil for his mistreatment of her and deceptive attitude towards Mariam. Jalil travels to visit Mariam, his illegitimate daughter, every Thursday. On her fifteenth birthday, Mariam wants her father to take her to see Pinocchio at his movie theater, against the pleas of her mother. Jalil promises to do so. When he does not come, she travels to his house in Herat and sleeps on the street outside after Jalil's doorman refuses to let her in, claiming that Jalil has gone on a business trip. Later, she storms into the house's garden and briefly sees Jalil, but his chauffeur drives her back home. Upon returning home, Mariam finds that her mother has committed suicide out of fear that her daughter had deserted her. She is taken to live in Jalil's house, but his wives push him to quickly arrange for Mariam to be married to Rasheed, a shoemaker from Kabul who is thirty years her senior. Mariam resists, but is soon pressured into the marriage, moving away with Rasheed. In Kabul, Rasheed is initially kind and waits for her to adjust. However, as Mariam becomes pregnant and miscarries multiple times, their relationship sours, and he becomes increasingly moody and abusive over her inability to bear him a son.

Meanwhile, a younger girl named Laila grows up in a neighboring house in Kabul. She is close to her father, a kind-hearted teacher, but worries over her mother, who is depressed and unresponsive following her two sons' deaths in the army. Laila is also close friends with Tariq, a neighbor boy, but their friendship is increasingly frowned upon by others as they grow older; in spite of this, they develop a secret romance. When Afghanistan enters the war and Kabul is bombarded by rocket attacks, Tariq's family decides to leave the city, and the emotional farewell between him and Laila culminates in them making love. Laila's family eventually also decides to leave the city, but a rocket destroys their house as they are preparing to leave, killing her parents and severely injuring Laila. She is subsequently taken in by Rasheed and Mariam.

As Laila recovers from her injuries, Rasheed expresses interest in her, to Mariam's dismay. Laila is also informed that Tariq and his family have died on their way out of the city. Upon discovering that she is pregnant with Tariq's child, Laila agrees to marry Rasheed to protect herself and the baby, giving birth to a daughter, Aziza, whom Rasheed rejects and neglects for being a girl. Jealous of Laila and Rasheed's interest in her, Mariam initially is very cold, but gradually warms Laila as she attempts to cope with both Rasheed's abuse and the baby. The two become close friends and confidants, formulating a plan to run away from Rasheed and leave Kabul, but they are soon caught. Rasheed beats them both, locking them up separately and depriving them of water, almost killing Aziza.

A few years later, the Taliban rises to power and imposes harsh rules on the Afghan population, severely curtailing women's rights. In a women's hospital that has been stripped of all supplies, Laila is forced to undergo a C-section without anesthesia to give birth to Rasheed's son, Zalmai. Laila and Mariam struggle with raising Zalmai, who Rasheed dotes on and favors greatly over Aziza. There is a drought, and living conditions in Kabul become poor. Rasheed's workshop burns down, and he is forced to take other jobs. He sends Aziza to an orphanage, and Laila endures a number of beatings from the Taliban when caught alone in attempts to visit her daughter.

One day, Tariq appears at the house and is reunited with Laila, who realizes that Rasheed had hired the man to falsely inform her of Tariq's death so that she would agree to marry him. When Rasheed returns home from work, Zalmai tells him about the visitor. Suspicious of Laila and Tariq's relationship, Rasheed savagely beats Laila. He attempts to strangle her, but Mariam intervenes and kills him with a shovel, telling Laila and Tariq to run. Afterward, she confesses to killing Rasheed in order to draw attention away from them and is publicly executed. Laila and Tariq leave for Pakistan with Aziza and Zalmai, and spend their days working at a guest house in Murree, a summer retreat.

After the fall of the Taliban, Laila and Tariq return to Afghanistan. They stop in the village where Mariam was raised and discover a package that Mariam's father left behind for her: a videotape of Pinocchio, a small sack of money, and a letter. Laila reads the letter and discovers that Jalil had regretted sending Mariam away, wishing that he had fought for her. Laila and Tariq return to Kabul and use the money to repair the orphanage Aziza had stayed in, where Laila starts working as a teacher. She becomes pregnant with her third child, and if it is a girl, vows to name her Mariam.

• Mariam is an ethnic Tajik born in Herat, 1959. She is the child of Jalil and Nana born out of wedlock. She suffers shame throughout her childhood because of the circumstances of her birth.[15] Khaled Hosseini described her portrayal: "The keyword with Mariam is that she is isolated in every sense of the word. She is a woman who is detached from the day-to-day norms of human existence. Really, she just wants a connection with another human being."[15] Despite initially resenting Laila, she becomes a "friend and a doting alternative mother" to her through the "common hardship" of being married to the "abusive, psychologically imposing" Rasheed.[15]
• Laila is an ethnic Tajik. Born in 1978, to Hakim and Fariba, she is a beautiful and intelligent girl coming from a family in which the father is a university-educated and a teacher. Hosseini states that compared to Mariam, Laila "had a much more fulfilling relationship with her father, her boyfriends and her childhood friend, Tariq. She expected to finish school and is looking for personal fulfillment. These are two very different representations of women."[15] Her life becomes tied to Mariam's when she becomes the second wife of Rasheed, Mariam's husband. This originally draws resentment from Mariam, who "[feels] her territory infringed upon".[15] Despite this, "Laila becomes her daughter for all practical purposes" due to Mariam's childlessness, struggles, and abuse they both face during the marriage.[15] Towards the end of the novel she becomes a schoolteacher at the orphanage where Aziza had stayed.[16]
• 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. After suffering years of domestic abuse at his hands, Mariam bludgeons Rasheed to death with a shovel during a violent struggle. Hosseini stated that he hoped to create a multi-layered character in Rasheed, saying, "Rasheed's the embodiment of the patriarchal, tribal character. In writing him, I didn't want to write him as an irredeemable villain. He is a reprehensible person, but there are moments of humanity, such as his love for his son."[15] He identified an encounter with an Afghan man four years earlier as the foundation for this character; the man "had a very sweet, subservient wife" and had not yet informed her that he was planning to marry again.[15]
• Tariq, an ethnic Pashtun born in 1976, is a boy who grew up in Kabul with Laila. He lost a leg to a land mine at the age of five.[16] They eventually evolve from best friends to lovers; after a decade of separation they are married and expecting a child by the end of the novel.[16]
• Nana is Mariam's mother and a former servant of Jalil. Mariam's birth is the result of an affair between Nana and Jalil. Jalil's favoritism towards his wives and legitimate children leaves Nana bitter towards Jalil. She hangs herself when Mariam is fifteen after Mariam journeys to Jalil's house on her birthday. Nana perceives this to be betrayal and regards as an act of desertion.
• Mullah Faizullah, a Sufi, is Mariam's elderly Koran teacher and friend. He dies of natural causes in 1989.
• Jalil is Mariam's father, a wealthy man who had three wives before he fathered Mariam. He marries Mariam to Rasheed after Nana's death,[17] but later regrets sending her away. He dies in 1987.
• Hakim is Laila's father. He is a well-educated and a progressive schoolteacher.[17] He is killed in a rocket explosion along with Fariba.[16]
• Fariba is Laila's mother. In Part One, during her brief meeting with Mariam, she is depicted as cheerful, but her happy nature is 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, and is later killed in a rocket explosion along with Hakim.[16]
• Aziza, born in the spring of 1993, is the daughter of Laila and Tariq, conceived when Laila was fourteen. When the news of Tariq's alleged death arrives, in order to hide the child's illegitimacy and provide for herself, Laila decides to marry Rasheed. Aziza's birth marks the beginning of Laila's fall from favor with Rasheed[17] and the friendship between Mariam and Laila.[16][18]
• Zalmai, born in September 1997, to Laila and Rasheed. He serves as a redeeming facet of Rasheed,[15] idolizing him despite the abuse to his mother and Mariam. Zalmai remains unaware of the fact that Mariam killed Rasheed and continuously asks Laila about him, who lies by saying that he simply left for some time. After initially blaming Tariq for his father's mysterious disappearance, he comes to accept Tariq as a father-figure.

In the first week following its release, A Thousand Splendid Suns sold over one million copies,[8] becoming a number-one New York Times bestseller for fifteen weeks.[7] Time magazine's Lev Grossman placed it at number three in the Top 10 Fiction Books of 2007, and praised it as a "dense, rich, pressure-packed guide to enduring the unendurable."[20][21] Jonathan Yardley said in the Washington Post "Book World", "Just in case you're wondering whether Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns is as good as The Kite Runner, here's the answer: No. It's better."[18]

A Thousand Splendid Suns received significant praise from reviewers, with Publishers Weekly calling it "a powerful, harrowing depiction of Afghanistan"[4] and USA Today describing the prose as "achingly beautiful".[22] Lisa See of The New York Times attributed the book's success to Hosseini "[understanding] the power of emotion as few other popular writers do".[23] Natasha Walter from The Guardian wrote, "Hosseini is skilled at telling a certain kind of story, in which events that may seem unbearable - violence, misery and abuse - are made readable. He doesn't gloss over the horrors his characters live through, but something about his direct, explanatory style and the sense that you are moving towards a redemptive ending makes the whole narrative, for all its tragedies, slip down rather easily."[24]

Cathleen Medwick gave the novel a highly positive review in O, the Oprah Magazine:

"Love may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you consider the war-ravaged landscape of Afghanistan. But that is the emotion—subterranean, powerful, beautiful, illicit, and infinitely patient—that suffuses the pages of Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns. As in his best-selling first novel, The Kite Runner, Hosseini movingly examines the connections between unlikely friends, the fissures that open up between parents and children, the intransigence of quiet hearts."[25]

The New York Times writer Michiko Kakutani wrote a more critical review, describing the opening as "heavy-handed" and early events in the novel as "soap-opera-ish".[26] Despite these objections, she concluded, "Gradually, however, Mr. Hosseini's instinctive storytelling skills take over, mowing down the reader's objections through sheer momentum and will. He succeeds in making the emotional reality of Mariam and Laila's lives tangible to us, and by conjuring their day-to-day routines, he is able to give us a sense of what daily life was like in Kabul — both before and during the harsh reign of the Taliban."[26] Similarly, Yvonne Zipp of The Christian Science Monitor concluded that A Thousand Splendid Suns was ultimately "a little shaky as a work of literature".[27]

The depictions of the lead female characters, Mariam and Laila, were praised by several commentators. John Freeman from The Houston Chronicle found them "enormously winning"[28] while Carol Memmott from USA Today further described them as "stunningly heroic characters whose spirits somehow grasp the dimmest rays of hope".[22] Medwick summed up the portrayals: "Mariam, branded as a harami, or bastard, and forced into an abusive marriage at the age of fifteen, and Laila, a beauty groomed for success but shrouded almost beyond recognition by repressive sharia law and the husband she and Mariam share. The story, epic in scope and spanning three decades, follows these two indomitable women whose fortunes mirror those of their beloved and battered country—'nothing pretty to look at, but still standing'—and who find in each other the strength they need to survive."[25]

Jennifer Reese from Entertainment Weekly dubbed Rasheed "one of the most repulsive males in recent literature".[29] Lisa See wrote that, with the exception of Tariq, "the male characters seem either unrelentingly evil or pathetically weak" and opined, "If a woman wrote these things about her male characters, she would probably be labeled a man-hater."[23]

On November 5, 2019, the BBC News listed A Thousand Splendid Suns on its list of the 100 most inspiring novels.[30]

Columbia Pictures owns the movie rights to the novel. Steven Zaillian finished writing the first draft of the screenplay in 2009[31] and is also slated to direct; Scott Rudin has signed on as a producer.[32] In May 2013, studios confirmed a tentative release date of 2015.[33]

The first theatrical adaptation of the novel premiered in San Francisco, California, on February 1, 2017. It is co-produced by the American Conservatory Theater and Theatre Calgary.[9]

• Khaled Hosseini's official website
• A Study Guide