A Thousand Spendid Suns

His second novel is finally published and it's better than his four million copies sold first novel, The Kite Runner. Khaled Hosseini has done for women in his second novel, A Thousand Spendid Suns, what he did for guys in his first novel--a three decade saga of two women who are interwoven into the fabric of war and family in Afghanistan from 1958 to the 1980s. The title is from a 17th century poem about Kabul by Saib-e-Tabrizi which says:

"One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,
Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls."

A beautiful metaphoric tribute to a land of paradoxes: intrigue, hardship, beauty, war, peace, hunger, strife, indulgences, and poverty. According to Hosseini, more than two million Afghan refugees reside in Pakistan today.