Review – A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hossieni

 

A Thousand Splendid Suns NOT…but a brilliantly written epic following two Afghan women’s lives. If you like your emotional pain to feel real, to sit like a swollen lump in your chest, and to get lots of it…read this book. It is utterly masterful. So much so that I’m reluctant to open the next book – this one still owns me.

Khaled Hosseini does his readers the kind turn of leaving them with hope and joy, having run them through every possible kind of agony first…but the appalling thing is, that even though this is fiction, you know this story and the stories that make up this story, are real. People do and have suffered like this for millennia.

Set in Afghanistan, Hosseini’s seamless storytelling introduces us to a male-dominated world and the burqa while taking us through the reasonably modern 70s into the Soviet occupation of the 80s, the factional deadly civil wars that followed, and the Taliban regime. Never been in a war zone? Try this.

Eye-opening, heart-opening. Highly recommended.