I needed several deep breaths to recover after closing this book. Mariam's and Laila's stories were utterly heart-wrenching, and Hosseini's prose was gripping from the first sentence to the last as he expertly wove the lives of these two women together.

A Thousand Splendid Suns takes its title from a (liberally) translated Afghani poem about Kabul and spans three decades of turmoil in Afghanistan as seen an experienced through the intertwined lives of the two main characters, Mariam and Laila. Mariam is the bastard daughter of wealthy businessman Jalil Khan and his former maid, an angry, emotionally abusive woman. Though Mariam loves her father desperately, she cannot access him in his community, relegated to a small shack where she lives with her mother until she runs away. Laila, born a generation later, is the daughter of doting intellectuals and reformers; however, after the drafting

and death

of her two older sons, Laila's mother becomes distant and disapproving.

The women's lives begin to intersect when Mariam's husband finds Laila buried under rubble and brings her into his home to be cared for by Mariam. Laila, at this point, has lost everything--her mother, her father, her brothers, her childhood best friend and first love. The relationship between the two women, as the years carry on, is loving, fraught, profound, and complicated. I loved watching the two of them grow, individually and together over the course of this powerful novel.

The lives of these women and their mutual husband, Rasheed, follow the course of Afghan history from the civil war in the 1970s through and beyond the rule of the Taliban into the early 2000s. I was captivated by the history covered in this novel and the emotional complexity of our heroines (though I acknowledge the legitimacy of critiques about Rasheed's flatness. Hosseini's depiction of his homeland is significant, and I was immensely affected by the power of this story.