A phenomenal second book | A Thousand Splendid Suns

Spendid is spendid | A Thousand Splendid Suns | Khaled Hosseini

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	• A Thousand Splendid Suns Khaled Hosseini Riverhead, 2007 - 372 pages average customer review:based on 1291 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Heart-wrenchingly beautiful

Judging from the number of reviews, I must be the last person on the planet to read this book. If you listened to the audiobook as I did, just a friendly warning: don't listen to it in public--because I defy you not to bawl like a baby at parts of this book, especially the last third.

"Suns" seemed to me like an allegorical tale. Hosseini has written a very observant, photographic picture of life in Afghanistan as seen through the eyes of Maryam, Laila and to some extent Rasheed and Tariq. This is definitely a book told through the women. It is about how each of their lives either expands and painfully, brutally and violently contracts at the whim of the men in their lives, just as Afghanistan is contracting and suffocating at the hands of the Russians, warlords and then the Taliban.

Hosseini does not spare the reader the pain and despair of Maryam's life, beginning with her betrayal by her father, through her daily life with the "cheerful cruelty" and violence of Rasheed, and Laila's unwelcome entry into it. He describes with incredible realism how Laila's life literally explodes around her.

I haven't read The Kite Runner, but after reading A Thousand Splendid Suns, I cannot wait.

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A phenomenal second book

Wow, I just finished reading this book last night, and it has really stuck with me. I couldn't put it down. I'd agree with others who've said the first half of the book is slower than the second half, but it was all engrossing, and I felt so involved with the two main characters, Miriam and Laila. Although much of the book is heartbreaking, you are able to see what the Afghan people have endured just in the past several decades, and what they will do to create a better future for their families.

Is this book brutal? Yes, in many parts. But, there is also alot of love and joy brought from family, friends, and the desire of these characters to take control of their own lives, even in the face of war, poverty, and at some points, extreme hunger and understandable feelings of futility.

I highly this book. It's an excellent follow-up to "The Kite Runner."

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Spendid is spendid

Just when I thought it couldn't get any better than "The Kite Runner" here comes "A Thousand Splendid Suns." I can't get enough of this genius, Hosseini. I wait with bated breath for his next masterpiece.

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A thousand splended suns

Wow, I didn't think this book would live up to it's predecessor - The Kite Runner ---- and it DID! Story setting is still the same, but the narrator is a girl. I can't believe I waited this long to buy it and read it!

Terrific

While I have to be honest and say that I didn't enjoy this novel *quite* as much as The Kite Runner, I still think it was a terrific book! Again I enjoyed being taken on a journey in Afghanistan, a place that I don't know much of anything about. It delves into a topic that I feel also many of us do not know about or understand and that's the life of a woman and her role in the family in that country.

To that point, I read on as a country is being torn apart, as friends and family are torn from each other...as the characters face obstacles and heartaches and make heartwrenching decisions that I can barely comprehend having to make. This book makes the plight of Afghanistan and their people a little more real and close to home.

I was intrigued, and had a hard time putting the book down. Hosseini is truly a talented author. One that I am so glad to have come across, thanks to the NY Times Best Sellers list!! With so many books out there it's hard to find an original novel, and this one satisfies that need. I look forward to his future works.

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After 103 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and with four million copies of The Kite Runner shipped, Khaled Hosseini returns with a beautiful, riveting, and haunting novel that confirms his place as one of the most important literary writers today. Propelled by the same superb instinct for storytelling that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once an incredible chronicle of thirty years of Afghan history and a deeply moving story of family, friendship, faith, and the salvation to be found in love. Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure 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 sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will 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. A stunning accomplishment, A Thousand Splendid Suns is a haunting, heartbreaking, compelling story of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship, and an indestructible love.

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