A Thousand Splendid Suns: A Story of Early Marriage, Loss, and Unbreakable Female Bonds

Khaled Hosseini’s  A Thousand Splendid Suns  is a heart-turning  and beautifully written novel that explores the struggles, sacrifices, and silent strength of women in Afghanistan over a span of thirty years. Through the intertwined lives of two women, Mariam and Laila, the book portrays the harsh realities of life under a patriarchal society, war, and personal loss.

Mariam, a bastard child of Jalil, a successful businessman, and his maid, Nana, is the start of the novel. Mariam lives in a small,  kolba (hut) outside the city of Herat, waiting constantly  for her father to love her. Despite Jalil visiting her from time to time, he will never acknowledge her outside their house. Mariam idolizes him and wants to live with him in the city, but this fantasy is destroyed when he turns her down after her mother, Nana, takes her own life. This is the starting point of Mariam's lifelong struggle.

After the death of her mother, Jalil's family accelerates Mariam's wedding to Rasheed, who is a violent, older man from Kabul. Mariam marries without love and is subjected to abuse at a tender age. Her life turns into one of suffering as Rasheed's brutishness and possessiveness break her spirit. Mariam is physically and emotionally tortured, suffers from miscarriages, and is totally cut off from the world. In narrating through her, Hosseini speaks the voice of the countless women in patriarchal societies who silently suffer.

While so, the novel's introduction of Laila, a smart and pretty girl whose parents belong to a forward-thinking family in Kabul, gives way to Laila's life becoming the center of all attention when her parents get murdered in a rocket attack during the civil war. Left alone with no one to take care of her, she is taken in by Mariam and Rasheed. Later, Rasheed coerces Laila into marriage with him, just because of their very large age difference. Laila too is a victim of Rasheed's cruelty but finds comfort in her very-rapidly growing relationship with Mariam.

Laila's and Mariam's relationship is the book's emotional beat. They begin as strangers, who are reduced only to being held under the same oppressive roof, and turn out to form a passionate, mother-daughter-like attachment. They unite in their resilience, courage, and raison d'être to survive the barbarically oppressive environment. Hosseini masterfully weaves the resilience of the human spirit and the silent mutual support of women.

Mariam's longing for her father is a poignant undercurrent that pervades the novel. Despite abandonment, betrayal, and abuse, part of her still holds on to Jalil's memory. She only finds out about the remorse of her father later, but by then her life has already been defined by irretrievable loss.

A Thousand Splendid Suns is not only a novel of war and repression but a novel of love, of sacrifice, of the unbreakable connection between women. The writing is beautifully evocative and empathetic, exposing the wrongs which have been inflicted on Afghan women and honoring their strength. The novel gives one lasting impression: the memory of the vulnerability and strength of the human heart.