A Thousand Splendid Suns

At the heart of the novel are the lives of two utterly different Afghan women whose worlds should never have crossed. Mariam is an illegitimate girl from a poor village, marked by shame from childhood, who is married off in her teens to a cruel man in Kabul much older than herself. Laila is the beloved daughter of a teacher, raised in love and dreaming of an education and a happy future with the man she loves, but she loses everything when the city is devastated by bombardment.
War and shared misfortune bring them under the same roof, turning them first into rivals and later into the closest people in each other’s lives. It is a stunning story of how, through the horrors of war, domestic abuse, and the brutality of patriarchal laws, a true and unbreakable bond of female friendship takes root — one capable of the greatest self-sacrifice.