Mapped
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Khaled Hosseini
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.
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The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini
The Kabul of a boy's memory before the wars: the walled gardens and quiet embassy streets of the affluent Wazir Akbar Khan district, a hill where kites fight over the rooftops each winter, and the lake west of the city where families picnic. The same places return years later scarred by Soviet occupation, civil war and Taliban rule, when a stadium becomes a killing ground.
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