A Thousand Splendid Suns..

I like reading a book more than anything. Though now days I don’t get enough time to read. Hmm I guess, “I don’t have time” seems like a decent enough excuse. Priorities make us so busy that we left with less or no time for our likings. Still somehow I manage to take out sometime for it especially when I get an interesting one.

 Just couple of  months back I finished Khaled Hosseini's second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, A story of two women and their lives in Afghanistan over the past 40 years. Though I haven’t read his first novel “The Kite Runner” but I watched the movie. Both I and my husband loved the movie .When I bought the book I wasn’t sure ,but  once I started reading it,  I couldn’t put it down. It made me angry, made me shocked, made me upset and made me loving. And I’m not ashamed to admit I cried a little too. Two women, Mariam and Laila, a generation apart, are thrown together under painful circumstances. The name of the book was taken from a poem written by Iranian poet Saib Tabrizi, quote lines in praise of Kabul: "One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.”

Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought in a same situation together by war, by loss and by fate. As they under goes  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 , friends, sisters or mother-daughter whatever  we name the relation, which 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.

After reading Hosseini's gripping, heart-wrenching story, it is impossible to ignore the fact that people in Middle East and Afghanistan in particular men, women, and children just like you and me are living these horrors every day. I encourage you to read “A Thousand Splendid Suns”. It may be fiction, but its message is true and will be true for all time: we all deserve happiness and live our life in our own way, even in impoverished rural towns and faraway deserts. I enjoyed the story, cared what happened, learned more about the countries I've only gotten to read about in newspapers and the book breathed life into an otherwise unclear world. Hate to make the comparison, but I liked it even more than The Kite Runner. This is one unforgettable and provocative epic tale, one novel that everyone should read.