"A Thousand Splendid Suns" by Khaled Hosseini

I wouldn’t be so surprised, a lot of Asian Girls have this as one of their favourite books ever because for the first time, we get a raw insight into what life is like for the women we are in the war. I read it for the first time maybe a year or so after it was released. It was released in 2007 and I read it in 2009 - so there we go. I loved this book from the very first time I read it. I re-read the book in 2012 because we had a read of it in school and then, I re-read it again in 2015 because I just felt like it and I was in the middle of university needing some respite. It’s one of those books that no matter how many times you read it - it will never fail to move you. It moves you emotionally and psychologically to a different place and the way in which it tells this story of women during a horrid war is almost too heartbreaking to read. The ending brings it all together and makes it half worth while and also leaves us with heartache for our characters. It’s a saga and a journey and definitely Khaled Hosseini’s greatest novel.

My favourite character in this book was obviously Mariam - she is a young child when she experiences a great tragedy and is sent to live with family members that don’t love her. She is treated as property and a servant under traditional constraints until she is married off at a young age to a man far older than she is. It starts off sad and for this woman, it will only get far worse before it only seems to get better. By the time Mariam meets Laila, it is almost too late - and Laila waits for Tariq to come home from the war. Mariam’s future will be wrought with destruction after she takes matters into her own hands. It is like her own personal revolution that will come full circle to haunt her.

My favourite theme in this book was always the value of human life. Human life in value goes up and down throughout the book but it always goes to show that the nicer and kinder people will prevail. The theme also goes to show that one human life can have an incredible impact on the way those around them and how it can resonate through history. I think that the ending to the book shows exactly how much life and legacy can mean to one or two people stuck in a similar situation for a length of time. With one’s want to save the other from harm, it becomes a want to save a human life from suffering because one person values another person a lot. This theme seems to represent the war throughout the book because, as the book moves along so does the war and more and more people are dying in this war that we aren’t told about. We get to see a snippet of what happens when it comes to certain individuals in extraordinary circumstances. From the representation of the war, we get the question of how much one human life is really worth. Is it the soldiers who are in the war dying, or is it someone who wants to change the circumstances of someone else’s suffering to goodness - it is a strange question that is only answered right at the end of the novel with the legacy of the child.

I think that far more people should read this book and become aware of the characters and their stories. It is a brilliant novel in which various characters become aware of each other through the force of violence. Whether it be through the war or through abuses, or even through violent death - characters always know each other based upon suffering and faith. It is an amazing novel that I’ll never really stop re-reading because I want to know exactly what makes each character act the way they do in a time of extreme crisis. I want to know what it is that makes them each react in an entirely different way and why one is right and one is massively wrong.