A Thousand Splendid Suns Summary: Khaled Hosseini's Story of Two Women in Kabul
What it is about
A Thousand Splendid Suns is Khaled Hosseini's second novel, published in May 2007 after the enormous success of his 2003 debut The Kite Runner. It follows two Afghan women across several decades of war, occupation and religious rule, and it brings them together under one roof in Kabul in circumstances neither of them chose.
Mariam is born near Herat, the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy businessman called Jalil and his former housekeeper, Nana. Mother and daughter live in a hut outside the city so that Mariam cannot embarrass Jalil's legitimate family. He visits every Thursday and is kind, in a way that his wives' arrangement makes cheap. After a family tragedy on Mariam's fifteenth birthday, she is married off to Rasheed, a widowed shoemaker from Kabul who is thirty years older, and sent away to live in his house.
Laila is born a generation later, into a far easier life. Her father is a schoolteacher who believes in educating his daughter. She grows up in the same Kabul street as Rasheed and Mariam, and she grows up alongside Tariq, a neighbourhood boy who loses a leg to a landmine and who becomes the centre of her world. Then civil war reaches Kabul, rockets fall on the city, and Laila's circumstances collapse in a single afternoon. She ends up in Rasheed's house too.
Hosseini has described the book as a mother-daughter story, set against The Kite Runner as a father-son story. The structure makes that plain. Two women who start out as rivals in a forced arrangement become something closer to family than either expected.
The main characters
Mariam carries the first part of the novel. She is shaped by shame she did not earn, taught by her mother to expect nothing and by her father to expect more than she will get. In Kabul she endures seven miscarriages, and Rasheed's courtesy curdles into cruelty as it becomes clear she will not give him a son. Her arc is the quietest and the most important one in the book.
Laila is the other half. She is educated, loved as a child, and far more confident than Mariam ever had the chance to be. Her ordeal is different in kind rather than degree. She arrives in Rasheed's house grieving and pregnant, and she makes a calculated decision to survive.
Rasheed is the novel's domestic tyrant. He is not a cartoon. Hosseini gives him charm at the start, pride in his work, and real affection for his son Zalmai, which makes his violence towards his wives and his coldness towards Laila's daughter Aziza land harder.
Tariq is the thread of tenderness running through Laila's life. Aziza and Zalmai, the two children, become the pressure points on which much of the later plot turns.
The themes
The most obvious one is the position of women in Afghan society across changing regimes. Soviet occupation, the Mujahideen civil war and then Taliban rule each alter what a woman may do, wear, learn or say. Under the Taliban, Laila is beaten for travelling alone to visit her own daughter in an orphanage. She gives birth by caesarean without anaesthetic in a stripped-out women's hospital.
Underneath that sits the subject the title really belongs to: friendship between women as a form of survival. Mariam and Laila begin in mutual suspicion. What grows between them is practical, daily and unsentimental. They cover for each other, plan together, and are punished together after a failed attempt to flee.
Family is the third thread, chosen as much as inherited. Jalil's cowardice as a father, Laila's mother's grief for her dead sons, Rasheed's favouritism between his children and the bond Mariam forms with a child who is not hers all sit on the same spectrum.
How it ends (spoilers)
Tariq, long believed dead, appears at Laila's door. Laila works out that Rasheed paid a man to lie about his death so that she would marry him. When Zalmai tells his father about the visitor, Rasheed attacks both women and begins strangling Laila. Mariam kills him with a shovel.
Knowing the Taliban will hunt them, Mariam turns herself in so that Laila, Tariq and the children can escape. She is publicly executed, and she goes to it calmly, having found love late. Laila and Tariq marry and settle in Murree in Pakistan, then return to Kabul after the Taliban fall. On the way, Laila visits Mariam's village and is given a box Jalil left behind: a videotape of Pinocchio, money, and a letter of apology. The money repairs the orphanage. Laila teaches there.
Why it still matters
The novel was a number one New York Times bestseller for fifteen weeks and sold over a million copies in its first week, with strong reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and Booklist. Columbia Pictures bought the film rights in 2007, and a stage adaptation premiered at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco in 2017.
It lasts because it gives thirty years of Afghan history a domestic scale. The politics arrive through a kitchen window. Readers who want fiction about endurance, about women's lives under extreme constraint, or about friendship that outlives the people in it will find this a direct and unsparing book.
