A Thousand Splendid Suns is a 2007 novel by Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini, following the huge success of his bestselling 2003 debut The Kite Runner. Mariam, an illegitimate teenager from Herat, is forced to marry a shoemaker from Kabul after a family tragedy. Laila, born a generation later, lives a relatively privileged life, but her life intersects with Mariam's when a similar tragedy forces her to accept a marriage proposal from Mariam's husband.
Hosseini has remarked that he regards the novel as a "mother-daughter story" in contrast to The Kite Runner, which he considers a "father-son story". It continues some of the themes used in his previous work, such as familial dynamics, but instead focusing primarily on female characters and their roles in contemporary Afghan society.
A Thousand Splendid Suns was released on May 22, 2007, and received favorable widespread critical acclaim from Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Booklist, and became a number one New York Times Best Seller for fifteen weeks following its release. During its first week on sale, it sold over one million copies. Columbia Pictures purchased film rights in 2007, and a theatrical adaptation of the book premiered on February 1, 2017, at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, California.
Creation
Title The title of the book comes from a line in Josephine Davis' translation of the poem "Kabul", by the 17th-century Iranian poet Saib Tabrizi:"Kabul" , oldpoetry.com "Every street of Kabul is enthralling to the eye Through the bazaars, caravans of Egypt pass One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs And the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls"
Hosseini explained "I was searching for English translations of poems about Kabul, for use in a scene where a character bemoans leaving his beloved city, when I found this particular verse. I realized that I had found not only the right line for the scene, but also an evocative title in the phrase 'a thousand splendid suns,' which appears in the next-to-last stanza."
Inspiration When asked what led him to write a novel centered on two Afghan women, Hosseini responded:"I had been entertaining the idea of writing a story of Afghan women for some time after I'd finished writing The Kite Runner. That first novel was a male-dominated story. All the major characters, except perhaps for Amir's wife Soraya, were men. There was a whole facet of Afghan society which I hadn't touched on in The Kite Runner, an entire landscape that I felt was fertile with story ideas...In the spring of 2003, I went to Kabul, and I recall seeing these burqa-clad women sitting at street corners, with four, five, six children, begging for change. I remember watching them walking in pairs up the street, trailed by their children in ragged clothes, and wondering how life had brought them to that point...I spoke to many of those women in Kabul. Their life stories were truly heartbreaking...When I began writing A Thousand Splendid Suns, I found myself thinking about those resilient women over and over. Though no one woman that I met in Kabul inspired either Laila or Mariam, their voices, faces, and their incredible stories of survival were always with me, and a good part of my inspiration for this novel came from their collective spirit."
Writing
Hosseini disclosed that in some ways, A Thousand Splendid Suns was more difficult to write than his first novel, The Kite Runner. He noted the anticipation for his second book when writing it, compared to The Kite Runner wherein "no one was waiting for it." He also found his second novel to be more "ambitious" than the first due to its larger cast of characters; its dual focus on Mariam and Laila; and its covering a multi-generational period of nearly forty-five years in total. However, he found the novel easier to write once he had begun, noting "as I began to write, as the story picked up the pace and I found myself immersed in the world of Mariam and Laila, these apprehensions vanished on their own. The developing story captured me and enabled me to tune out the background noise and get on with the business of inhabiting the world I was creating." The characters "took on a life of their own" at this point and "became very real for [him]".
Similar to The Kite Runner, the manuscript had to be extensively revised; with Hosseini ultimately rewriting the book five times before it was complete. The novel's anticipated release was first announced in October 2006, when it was described as a story about "family, friendship, faith and the salvation to be found in love".
Plot
On the outskirts of Herat, Mariam lives with her embittered mother, Nana, in a secluded hut. Born as the result of an affair between her mother and Jalil, a wealthy local businessman, Mariam and her mother live outside the city to avoid embarrassing Jalil's legitimate family. Nana resents Jalil for his duplicitous kindness towards Mariam, whom he visits every Thursday. On Mariam’s fifteenth birthday, Jalil does not show up to take her to see Pinocchio in town as promised. Against Nana’s wishes, Mariam travels into the city to find her father, and sleeps outside his house when told he is away, later discovering he was home the entire time. Heartbroken, she returns home to find that Nana has committed suicide by hanging. At the behest of Jalil’s family, Mariam is rushed into marriage with Rasheed, a widowed shoemaker from Kabul thirty years her senior, and moves to Kabul. Rasheed is initially courteous to Mariam, but over the course of seven miscarriages becomes increasingly abusive, angered by her inability to provide him a son. Years later, an ailing Jalil attempts to visit Mariam, but she refuses to allow him inside.
Meanwhile, Mariam's young neighbor Laila grows up close to her schoolteacher father and worries for her is her mother, who is deeply depressed following the death of her two sons fighting for the Mujahideen against the Soviets. Laila is close friends with Tariq, a local Pashtun boy, and romance develops between them as they grow up. When Laila is fourteen, civil war breaks out in Afghanistan, and Kabul is bombarded by frequent rocket attacks. Tariq's family decide to leave the city and, while saying their good-byes, he and Laila have sex in a moment of passion. Shortly after, a rocket hits Laila’s home as they prepare to flee, killing her parents. She is taken in by Mariam and Rasheed, and as she recovers from her injuries, Rasheed begins courting her, to Mariam's dismay. A man arrives at Rasheed's home to inform Laila that Tariq and his family died in a bomb blast on their way to Pakistan. Realizing that she is pregnant with Tariq's child, Laila agrees to marry Rasheed, convincing Rasheed that the child is his. She gives birth to a daughter, whom she names Aziza.
The childless Mariam initially treats Laila coldly, avoiding contact with her and Aziza, but they eventually become friends, forming a close mother-daughter-like bond and supporting each other in enduring Rasheed's abuse. They attempt to flee one day, but are caught by the local police and severely beaten and nearly starved by Rasheed as punishment. Meanwhile, the Taliban rise to power in Kabul and impose harsh rules on the local population, severely curtailing women's rights. Laila is forced to give birth to a son, Zalmai, via caesarian section without anaesthesia in a deprived women’s hospital. Laila and Mariam struggle with raising Zalmai, whom Rasheed dotes on and favors over Aziza. During a drought, Rasheed's workshop burns down, and he is forced to take other jobs, worsening his mood and abuse. As food supplies run low, Rasheed forces Laila to send Aziza to an orphanage and refuses to accompany her to visit, causing Laila to endure beatings from the Taliban for traveling alone.
One day, Tariq suddenly shows up on Laila's doorstep, much to her shock. Laila realizes that Rasheed had paid the man to lie to her about Tariq's death, so that she would stay in Kabul and marry him. Laila and Mariam plan to escape again, this time with Tariq's help. However, when Rasheed returns home from work, Zalmai informs his father Rasheed that Laila had a male visitor. Enraged, Rasheed begins viciously beating the women and attempts to strangle Laila. To save Laila, Mariam kills Rasheed with a shovel. Knowing the Taliban would be after them, Mariam decides to turn herself in to draw attention away from Laila and Tariq's escape with the children. Confessing the murder to the Taliban, Mariam is sentenced to public execution. She complies peacefully, having found unexpected happiness and love in her years with Laila and the children.
Laila and Tariq successfully escape Afghanistan with the children and move east to Murree in the Pakistani Punjab, and they marry. After the fall of the Taliban, they return to Kabul to join the rebuilding of Afghan society. They stop en route to Herat, and Laila visits the village where Mariam was raised. She meets with the son of a kindly mullah who had taught Mariam, and he gives her a box Jalil had left for Mariam should she return to Herat. The box contains a videotape of Pinocchio, a sack of money, and a letter in which Jalil expresses his regret and love for Mariam, wishing he had fought for her and raised her as his child. The family return to Kabul and use the money to repair the orphanage Aziza had stayed in, and Laila works there as a teacher. She becomes pregnant with her third child, whom she intends to name Mariam if it is a girl.
Analysis
Family When asked about common themes in The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, Hosseini replied:"Both novels are multigenerational, and so the relationship between parent and child, with all of its manifest complexities and contradictions, is a prominent theme. I did not intend this, but I am keenly interested, it appears, in the way parents and children love, disappoint, and in the end honor each other. In one way, the two novels are corollaries: The Kite Runner was a father-son story, and A Thousand Splendid Suns can be seen as a mother-daughter story."
He considers both novels to be "love stories" in the sense love "draws characters out of their isolation, that gives them the strength to transcend their own limitations, to expose their vulnerabilities, and to perform devastating acts of self-sacrifice".
Women in Afghanistan Hosseini visited Afghanistan in 2003, and "heard so many stories about what happened to women, the tragedies that they had endured, the difficulties, the gender-based violence that they had suffered, the discrimination, the being barred from active life during the Taliban, having their movement restricted, being banned essentially from practicing their legal, social rights, political rights". This motivated him to write a novel centered on two Afghan women.
The Washington Post critic Jonathan Yardley suggested that "the central theme of A Thousand Splendid Suns is the place of women in Afghan society", pointing to a passage in which Mariam's mother states, "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. You remember that, Mariam."
In the book, both Mariam and Laila are forced into accepting marriage to Rasheed, who requires them to wear a burqa long before it is implemented by law under the Taliban. He later becomes increasingly abusive. A Riverhead Trades Weekly review states that the novel consistently shows the "patriarchal despotism where women are agonizingly dependent on fathers, husbands and especially sons, the bearing of male children being their sole path to social status."
Reception