A Thousand Splendid Suns
by Khaled Hosseini
Bloomsbury, HK$208
Khaled Hosseini's debut novel, The Kite Runner, was one of those publishing rarities: a word-of-mouth best-seller that became a book club favourite, sold millions of copies, and won its author a Hollywood film deal. With such lineage, a second novel would need to execute some amazing literary gyrations while balancing heavy expectations on its spine.
Hosseini, who took a sabbatical from his work as a physician, admits to many false starts as he began work on A Thousand Splendid Suns. The book is set in Afghanistan against the backdrop of the past 30 years - from the Soviet invasion to the Taleban era to post-September 11 - and hinges on the lives of two Afghan women, Mariam and Laila.
Mariam is born a harami, the bastard child of Herat's wealthiest businessman, and grows up in a tiny shack on the outskirts of the city in the company of her bitter mother. During the eagerly awaited weekly visits of her father Mariam learns about the world that exists beyond her shack, about cinema halls and rockets, Kabul and its king and a bloodless coup. At night she dreams of living with her father in his splendid house in Herat. The elusive, spit-polished father who interjects in Mariam's life intermittently acquires a steady sheen even as her mother seeks to educate her on the rubicon of a woman's existence. 'Learn this now and learn it well, my daughter: Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.'
The spell breaks soon enough: in the worst tradition of a poor, conservative society, Mariam is married off at the age of 15 to a man three times her age. Rasheed, a shoemaker and widower, carts her off to Kabul, where his first gift to her is a burqa: 'a woman's face is her husband's business only'.