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A Thousand Splendid Suns: Summary and book reviews of A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, plus links to an excerpt from A Thousand Splendid Suns and a biography of Khaled Hosseini.
A Thousand Splendid Suns
by
Khaled Hosseini
Hardcover: May 2007,
384 pages.
Paperback: Nov 2008,
384 pages.
Propelled by the same superb instinct for storytelling
that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns
is at once an incredible chronicle of thirty years of Afghan history and a
deeply moving story of family, friendship, faith, and the salvation to be found
in love.
Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family,
Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by
fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them - in their home as
well as in the streets of Kabul - they come to form a bond that makes them both
sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the
course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With
heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman's love for her
family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in
the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to
survival.
Book Reviews
BookBrowse
Some readers may find A Thousand Splendid Suns a little too melodramatic and sentimental for their tastes. This reviewer started off cynical but was entirely won over by the end - starting the book in the evening and waking up before dawn to finish it, reading by fading flashlight as the sun rose and the pages blurred through the tears. Full Review (members only, 1024 words).
Booklist - Kristine Huntley
Starred Review. Unimaginably tragic, Hosseini's magnificent second novel is a sad and beautiful testament to both Afghani suffering and strength.
Kirkus Reviews
Starred Review. Another artistic triumph, and surefire bestseller, for this fearless writer.
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Hosseini gives a forceful but nuanced portrait of a 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.
The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani
In the end it is these glimpses of daily life in Afghanistan — a country known to most Americans only through news accounts of war and terrorism — that make this novel, like The Kite Runner, so stirring, and that distract attention from its myriad flaws.
Entertainment Weekly - Jennifer Reese
Hosseini's depiction of Mariam and Laila's plight would seem cartoonishly crude if it were not, by all accounts, a sadly accurate version of what many Afghan women have experienced. The romantic twists and fairy-tale turns are not so accurate. But, as in The Kite Runner, they are precisely what make the novel such a stirring read. B+
The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley A Thousand Splendid Suns is popular fiction of the first rank, which is plenty good enough, but it is not literature and should not be mistaken for such ... Many of us learned much from The Kite Runner. There is much more to be learned from A Thousand Splendid Suns. It is, for all its shortcomings, a brave, honorable, big-hearted book.
Minneapolis Star Tribune - John Freeman
The texture of these characters' journey around the craters of their country is no doubt well known to readers of international news. Rendered as fiction in A Thousand Splendid Suns, however, it devastates in a new way. It forces us to imagine what we would do had we been born to such grim fates.
San Francisco Chronicle - Julie Foster
Hosseini's bewitching narrative captures the intimate details of life in a world where it's a struggle to survive, skillfully inserting this human story into the larger backdrop of recent history.
The London Times - Tom Deveson
One problem is that historical and political concerns are too observably wheeled into place .... You can almost see pencil lines being drawn in the margin by earnest book-group readers.
The Guardian - Natasha Walter
Where Hosseini's novel begins to sing is in depicting the slowly growing friendship of the two wives in the face of the horrific abuse from their shared husband.
The London Times - Joan Smith
In A Thousand Spended Suns, Hosseini is not just more assured, although this feels like the work of a much more accomplished writer. If he cut his teeth by writing about his countrymen, it is the plight of Afghanistan’s women that has brought him to realise his full powers as a novelist.
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A Thousand Splendid Suns
(members only, 1024 words).
The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani
The London Times - Tom Deveson
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