Review: A Thousand Splendid Suns.

And here goes another amazing book added to my "Completed Reading" list, A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. Its the second installment from the author of The Kiterunner fame.
A Thousand Splendid Suns is a story again set in Afghanistan, Herat and Kabul to be exact. And this time there is no escaping to the U.S. but it starts, suffers and end in Afghanistan switching for a very short time to Pakistan.
The story is mainly based on two women, and gives us a close up view of their everyday life, their joys, their sufferings, their desperation to be independent from the tortures and misery and their efforts to claim it. The two female characters are chosen very carefully, the first one is Mariam, a harami born out of an accidental affair between the most richest person of Herat and his maid servant while the other one is Laila, the daughter of an university professor, educated in school and is free from wearing burkha or following any improper rules of the Muslim community. As luck would have it, the lives of these two women from completely two different rungs of society clash together and are made to walk the same path. But finally, one
sacrifices herself for the sake of another and gifts her a completely new life without misery and sufferings.
A Thousand Splendid Suns is spread over a time period of around forty years but it brings in two many characters in this short period of time. It starts off with Mariam as a child, her growing up and her marriage. Then it moves on to Laila being born, her growing up, her schooling, her teenage life, her affair with her neighborhood friend, Tariq. And then comes the attacks in Afghanistan and a detailed account of the fall of the country is given here. And finally the clash of the lives of Mariam and Laila, their joys and miseries and at last on delivers the other. A short account of the post-delivery life is also seen. To compress such a long storyline in just 384 pages, the story often appears rushed through moves on without letting in anything.
However, to get clear thorough picture of the war ravaged country, A Thousand Splendid Suns is the best book I have got my hands on till date. The detailed portrayal by the author actually gets you to visualize with clarity.
Overall, I would rate this book a seven out of ten and would request you to read it up once just to learn what women go through in some third world countries even in the twenty first century and how an entire country can be entirely devastated due to the vested interests of some powerful biggies.