A Thousand Splendid Suns

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By Khaled Hosseini

Mariam is fifteen when she is married off to Rasheed, a shoemaker in Kabul thirty years her senior. Nearly two decades later Laila, educated and much younger, ends up in the same house after a rocket kills her parents.

The two women begin as rivals and become the only protection each has. Thirty years of Afghan history, from the Soviet invasion through the civil war to the Taliban, told through one household.

First published 2007