Laila, a blond-haired beauty from a progressive Kabul family, is later cornered into a marriage to the same man to conceal an unplanned pregnancy by a lost lover. Mariam, the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy businessman from Herat, is forced into a loveless marriage with a much older Kabul shoemaker. This novel views Afghanistan's troubled history through the eyes of two Afghan women, who feel the daily privations of a nation at war more keenly than men but for whom, under Shari'a law, there is no real prospect of asylum. Readers will find A Thousand Splendid Suns a more diffuse, less tightly plotted work. in 1980, could draw on personal experience as he narrated the life of a protagonist whose family, like his, flees to San Francisco to escape the Afghan revolution. Hosseini, who was born in Kabul and whose family was granted political asylum in the U.S. Published less than two years after 9/11, it described the history and culture of Afghanistan, a country most Americans knew nothing about even as their government waged its war on terror there (and had just expanded that war to include Iraq). The Kite Runner was like the quintessential Oprah's Book Club selection that never quite made Oprah's list. Khaled Hosseini's first novel, The Kite Runner, struck a national nerve on so many levels it would be unfair to expect his second book, A Thousand Splendid Suns (Riverhead Books, 372 pages, $25.95), to score a similar triumph.
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