Book recommendation for March 2025: A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
This is a story that will break your heart, that will leave you cursing the cruelty of man, and make you wish you had never read it just so you could go back and read it again as if for the first time.
What’s it about: The story starts in Kabul, Afghanistan, in the 1970s. Mariam is an illegitimate child, the result of an affair between her mother and a local businessman. Aged fifteen, she is married off to Rasheed, a widower who is some 30 years older than her and [content warning] becomes physically and emotionally abusive. The tale carries us into the late 1980s, and Mariam strikes up a friendship with her neighbour, a teenager named Laila, and their bond becomes like mother and daughter. Then, civil war breaks out across Afghanistan and the Taliban sweep to power. Well, you can imagine how hard their lives become, but this only brings them closer as they struggle against starvation, brutality and fear. Yet love can move a person to act in unexpected ways, and leads them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with a startling heroism.
Why I love it: There’s something about Khaled Hosseini’s style and voice that, from the first page, made me realise I was reading a book unlike anything I had before. It was refreshing to read something written by an author from a different background and culture to my own, and to give a voice to a people that I had no prior exposure to. Like all great books, it transported me to another world, it was true escapism, and despite the horrors and hardships faced by Mariam and Laila, I could not stop reading. The story of their friendship, their love, set against the backdrop of the devastation of a country, is told so beautifully. It is simply outstanding and I dare you to read it and not be moved.
Beyond the book: This was the first book that made me cry, and it broke the floodgates because it’s not the last either. During my commute home from work, and much to my surprise, as I was on a bus travelling along the motorway from Cardiff to Swansea, the story reached an emotional climax and I found myself crying. There are many moments that tug at your heart strings but I must have reached capacity and it all spilled over (out?). Try as I might, the tears started flowing. I was trying to play it cool and hide but there was no way I could stop reading, or stop crying, and pretty soon I was a confused, blubbering wreck. The guy next to me did not know where to look! Needless to say, when a free double seat opened up I swiftly moved (to the relief of us both).
I actually bought my copy in a bookshop in Kathmandu, Nepal, after I’d finished a trek to Mount Everest Base Camp. It had a cool little price tag on it with the name of the shop. I kept it on, purposefully, as a reminder of that trip. Then, several years later, someone I leant it to, for reasons I cannot fathom, scratched off that price tag!! It almost reduced me to tears again.
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