A Thousand Splendid Suns

While I was up at the 2008 SAE World Congress this week, I finished reading A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini [amazon.com]. Hosseini was the author who also wrote The Kite Runner [amazon.com].


The Kite Runner focused on the ethnic divisions among the people of Afghanistan, and how those divisions have shaped Afghani life. In particular, he focused on the Hazaras, which is an ethnic group that has many parallels to the Kurds or the Palestinians.

In A Thousand Splendid Suns, ethnic divisions take a back seat as he describes the lives of two women, and how women were affected not only by the Soviet invasion and the coming of the Taliban, but also how women's rights differed by geographical area.

I think that Hosseini has a real gift with storytelling. I bail out of about half of the books I try to read in the first 100 pages or so. This book is similar to the Kite Runner in that the story it contains is interesting on several levels. He includes enough detail that the characters seem real and identifiable with. He wraps in tons of details about Afghani culture and life in such a subtle way that you are not even aware how much you are learning. And he doesn't rely upon contrived suspense (as in books by Dan Brown, like the Da Vinci Code [amazon.com]) in order to keep the reader hooked.

Picture of A Thousand Splendid Suns via mamichan's Flickr photostream.