A Thousand Splendid Suns

Thirty years of Afghan history seen through two women married to the same brutal man in Kabul. Mariam grows up outside Herat and is married off to the shoemaker Rasheed; years later the educated Laila, orphaned when a rocket destroys her family's house, becomes his second wife, and the two women's alliance carries the book. The city is real and specific: Rasheed's house in the Deh-Mazang district, the dry-riverbed market called Titanic City, and the Ghazi Stadium where the Taliban hold their executions.

Mariam

Herat and Gul Daman

Part 1

Mariam is a harami, an illegitimate child, raised apart from her wealthy father Jalil, who owns a cinema in Herat and visits once a week. When she walks into the city to claim him and is turned away, and her mother dies, she is married off at fifteen to Rasheed and sent east to Kabul, out of this world for good.

Part 1

inspired by Mariam grows up in a hillside hut, a kolba, near the village of Gul Daman outside the real city of Herat in western Afghanistan; the hut is invented and sited in the country outside the city.

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