Emotionally Moving; Historical Fiction; Familial Love
Book Summary
A Thousand Splendid Suns is the portrait two young women, brought up in the wrath of wounded country, scarred with death and violence blazing in the treacherous streets around them. Fifteen year old Mariam is sent to the unfamiliar city of Kabul, after the tragic tale of her childhood, to marry a bitter, cold widower by the name of Rasheed. It is a marriage that painfully deteriorates into pure brutality and misery, further worsened by the torment of the cruel world around her, jesting that for Mariam nowhere is safe.
Many years later, Laila, a bright, young teenager with strong aspirations for the future, paves her own way of love through a city crippled with hate. Yet when the Taliban takes over, to be a woman on the streets of Kabul becomes virtually a crime, life for both Laila and Mariam becomes a desperate struggle against starvation, brutality and fear. Both the lives these two women intertwine and form a beautiful, strong bond of unbreakable devotion; in a tale of the power of love, and its gentle strength in moving a person to survive the inescapable evil that is slowly shredding up their surrounding world.
"One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls."
Is this book perfect for me?
This book is perfect for readers that enjoy a bittersweet novel containing both heart-warming scenes of love's gentle chokehold but also moments of pure devastation and despair. Khaled Hosseini has a divine power for writing novels with such ineffable beauty and anguish, it leaves such a strong burning sensation your heart that only reader's who have experienced the magical journey of his writing can fathom to understand.
This book is also perfect for readers that love the genre of historical fiction. The history and culture of Afghanistan is brought into light throughout the entirety of this alluring novel. The two tales of both Mariam and Laila are constantly swayed by the pernicious conflict, and how calamitous that is for two ordinary young women, giving reader's an awareness of sensitivity into the world around us and the privileges we are lucky to hold.
“A woman who will be like a rock in a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied but shaped by the turbulence that washes over her."
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