A Thousand Splendid Suns

A Thousand Splendid Suns is a novel by the Afghan-American writer Khaled Hosseini, published in 2007 by Riverhead Books. It followed his debut, The Kite Runner, and it was a number one New York Times bestseller for fifteen weeks after its release.

The book begins with Mariam, the illegitimate daughter of a Herat household, whose mother's death leaves her married to a shoemaker from Kabul who is much older than she is. Her life in that house is the one the novel returns to, because a generation later it is where Laila arrives. Laila has grown up in a Kabul that offered her an education and a father who encouraged it, and when the family she depended on is destroyed she accepts a proposal from the same man, becoming the second wife in a marriage that has already been shaped by cruelty and disappointment. The two women begin as rivals in a household neither of them chose and become the closest thing either has to family.

The novel covers about thirty years of Afghan history around them, from the years before the Soviet invasion through the civil war and the rule of the Taliban, and the title comes from a line in the poem Kabul by the seventeenth-century poet Saib Tabrizi.