a thousand splendid suns by khaled hosseini

He chastised himself because he had not only decided to write from a woman's standpoint, but had decided to write from the standpoints of two women. He worried about finding the right voice for the book, writing through four drafts using different approaches and points of view. You wonder: Am I a hack? It took a little bit of work to ignore the noise outside my door.' In fact, for a while, Hosseini rented an office in a nondescript office building, a room with nothing on the walls to distract him that he now calls his windowless bunker. 'You go through these crises of self-doubt. 'Suddenly everybody was interested in what I was writing next,' he says with a pleasant, rueful laugh. Hosseini appears remarkably unaffected by the hoopla over his first novel.īut later in the conversation, Hosseini admits the success of his first book, which has sold more than 4 million copies, cast a looming shadow over early attempts at composing the new novel. He briefly, politely, interrupts the call to kiss his son goodbye as he heads off to school. Hosseini was an internist at a Bay Area Kaiser hospital before the phenomenal popularity of The Kite Runner allowed him to take an extended leave of absence. 'As a writer, the things that always move me are the intimate human stories, the links between the characters, their dreams, their disappointments, their crushing defeats and their atonements,' Hosseini says during a call to his home in San Jose, California. Most of A Thousand Splendid Suns depicts the extraordinary relationship that develops under grim circumstances between these two women. Her husband brutalizes her and eventually takes in, then marries, a young, well-educated girl Laila who has been orphaned during the Afghan civil war. Life in Kabul goes from bad to worse under the Soviet occupation. When her presence at the periphery of her father's life threatens family peace, she is forced into marriage with a shoemaker from Kabul.

She grows up exiled with her mother to a hovel in the hills outside the city, visited occasionally by the father she adores. Mariam is the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy Herat movie house owner. Hosseini, a superb storyteller, realizes those possibilities fully in A Thousand Splendid Suns, his textured, deeply affecting novel about the intersecting lives of two Afghan women.

It was a landscape that I felt was rich with possibilities for storytelling.' 'So there was this entire aspect of Afghan society and Afghan life that I hadn't touched upon. 'There are women characters in The Kite Runner, but I wouldn't describe any of them as major characters,' he says. After the unexpected success of his first novel, The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini decided to focus his second book on a part of Afghan society often obscured from public view its women.

A thousand splendid suns by khaled hosseini