Thousands of blazing suns
The Fates of Women in Afghanistan
Khaled Hosseini's second book and worldwide bestseller brings the story of two women and their tangled, dramatic, and more or less tragic lives against the backdrop of war in Afghanistan. Their initial mistrust gradually turns into a love that is a matter of life and death.
Mariam is a harami, a child of sin, who spends her life searching for a relationship that would offer her a sense of love and security. She grows up with an embittered mother, and her adored “visiting” father ultimately betrays her, marrying her off to Rasheed, a man thirty years her senior, who increasingly succumbs to his violent tendencies. Laila, twenty years younger, is incomparably happier; she has loving parents and a best friend, Tariq. However, all this vanishes when war enters her life, and Laila suddenly finds herself without parents, pregnant, in Mariam and Rasheed’s household. After initial rejection, Mariam and Laila are brought together by their shared fate—the fate of victims of Rasheed’s temper, the fate of women without rights in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. But Laila and Mariam will defy their destiny.
What they wrote about the book:
The story of the two women captivated me immensely; I read the book in one sitting. The author has an exceptional gift for storytelling. I came to the conclusion that it's not bad at all to be born a woman in the Czech Republic, to be able to go to school, and to freely choose a partner, a job, and clothes. You realise all this after reading about the fate of women from Afghanistan and similar places.
- Barvinka
Khaled Hosseini
Khaled Hosseini was born in 1965 in Kabul, Afghanistan, to a diplomat and a Farsi teacher. The communist coup and subsequent Soviet occupation in the late 1970s prevented the family from returning from Paris, where Hosseini's father was on a diplomatic mission. As a result, Khaled Hosseini has lived in the USA since the 1980s, where his family was granted asylum. He first studied medicine and practised as a doctor for eight years, while also working on his first book, The Kite Runner, which became an instant bestseller in 2003, not only in the USA but around the world. His second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns from 2007, gained similar popularity. After a long six-year wait, during which Khaled Hosseini, in addition to writing, also served as a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador and worked for his foundation, The Khaled Hosseini Foundation, which provides humanitarian aid to impoverished Afghans, his new novel, And the Mountains Echoed, reached readers, achieving worldwide success immediately upon release and has since been published in over 40 countries.
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| Code: | AUD05581 |
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