The history of women is a fight for recognition. Mythological Eve was accused of tempting Adam with forbidden fruit. Women such as Joan of Arc were burned alive for suspected, unproved witchcraft. Some, like Joan of Arc and Hua Mulan, dressed as men to fight battles. And today there is a struggle to be paid the same as men for doing the same job.

Women have succeeded in achieving rights and liberties, though many people still believe them to be the weaker sex. Women in western societies take education, work, freedom of speech and choice for granted. But not necessarily elsewhere.

A Thousand Splendid Suns gives insight into the lives of two very different women who are brought together by the inclemency of war. In a destroyed and impoverished Afghanistan, solidarity plays a huge role, giving someone who lost everything a second chance.

Although confronted by each other at first, Mariam and Laila develop a close friendship which turns into a hideaway from a life they can't escape. They are both married to Rasheed - a religious, traditionalist shoe-maker - who makes them wear burqas and forbids them to leave his home without him. They soon experience daily beatings, verbal abuse and threats. Laila's free-spirited education and loving childhood memories mean that she's less willing to accept his behaviour. She says what she thinks. It earns her only escalating aggression - aggravated when she gives birth to a girl. Her husband's disillusion is matched by the fear she feels towards him.

The Taliban invasion of Afghanistan causes Laila to have a caesarean without anaesthetic after visiting many hospitals which refuse to accept women. Antibiotics have been redirected to men's hospitals. Women doctors are only allowed to operate seeing through the nets of burqas.

Laila and Mariam spend afternoons sitting outside drinking tea, which becomes a ritual they treasure. But when bombs and shooting start happening all the time, they reluctantly have to give up meeting every day. Submissively they both accept their fate. They take strength in the children they are bringing up, who see them evolve into an unbreakable link in a chain.

There's a turning point when a ghost from the past goes back to Kabul and uncovers an unforgivable lie. The lives of all of them will be touched by unconditional love, friendship and parenthood.

A Thousand Splendid Suns is Khaled Hosseini's second book: The Kite Runner, 2003, was the first. He was born in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1965 and moved to the United States in 1980. There is a postscript to A Thousand Splendid Suns in which he explains that some of the (most terrible) things in the book are based on fact. Even if that is shocking, it's complementary rather than the reason why Laila and Mariam feel so real; that comes from his ability to evoke the taste, smell, sight and feel of Afghanistan.

(c) Gabriela Scavuzzo 2008

reviewed Thursday 26 November 08 / London

NOTES - A Thousand Splendid Suns. First published 22 May 2007 by Riverhead Books. Written by Khaled Hosseini. In print and available from bookshops. ISBN 978-1-59448-950-1 (first edition, hardcover). Notes source: Wikpedia at 26 November 08. / Paperback edition September 2008 Bloomsbury Publishing plc ISBN: 978-0-7475-8589-3. Notes source www.books-by-isbn.com at 26 November 08.