A Thousand Splendid Suns Summary

Mariam lives in the small village of Gul Daman with her mother. She is the illegitimate
daughter of Jalil, a wealthy businessman who lives in the nearby city of Herat. After her
mother's suicide, she is sent to live with Jalil. Jalil and his wives quickly marry Mariam
off to a shoemaker named Rasheed, and the newlyweds move to Kabul, where Mariam
becomes pregnant. Sadly, Mariam miscarries. Rasheed is furious and becomes
abusive.

Across Kabul (and in a galaxy far, far away…) a girl named Laila is born on the same
night that the Soviets take control of Afghanistan. Her best friend (and love interest) is
Tariq, a neighborhood boy who lost a leg when he was a child. With the war worsening,
Tariq's family decides to leave for Pakistan, and he and Laila consummate their
relationship the night before he leaves. Laila's family decides to leave soon after, but
her parents are killed by a stray rocket as they're packing up the car.

Rasheed and Mariam care for Laila as she recovers. A man comes by and tells Laila
that he saw Tariq die in a hospital. Rasheed, being the dirt ball that he is, uses this as
an opportunity to ask Laila to marry him. Surprisingly, she says yes. It turns out that
she's pregnant with Tariq's child. Her plan is to convince Rasheed that the child is his,
and then escape to Pakistan after she's saved enough money.

Mariam resents Laila at first, but she eventually becomes close to Laila and her new
daughter, Aziza. Laila tells Mariam about her plan to escape, and Mariam decides to
join them. They eventually go through with the plan, but they're arrested before they can
leave and are sent home with Rasheed. He is so furious that he almost kills them.

Laila and Rasheed have a son named Zalmai. After Rasheed's shop burns to the
ground and the family goes broke, he forces Laila to send Aziza to a nearby orphanage.
One day, after visiting Aziza, Laila returns home to find a very surprising guest: it's
Tariq. It turns out the man who had come by all those years ago was hired by Rasheed
to trick Laila. Laila tells Tariq about Aziza, and he promises that he will meet her the
following day.

Rasheed starts to beat Laila that night when he finds out about Tariq. Mariam ends up
killing Rasheed to protect Laila. Mariam remains in Kabul to take the blame and is
executed by the Taliban. Laila, Tariq, and the kids move to Tariq's home in Murree,
where life is comfortable. After the U.S. invasion, however, Laila decides to return to
Kabul.

Before returning home, Laila stops in Herat, Mariam's hometown. She visits Mariam's
childhood home, and receives a box for the local Mullah's son that was meant for
Mariam. It's from her father Jalil. It contains a long letter, as well as her share of his
inheritance. Laila uses the money to renovate the orphanage in Kabul, and we learn at
the close of the book that she is pregnant with a new child.
Reflection on “A Thousand Splendid Suns”
Essay
“One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs. And the thousand splendid suns that
hide behind her walls.”

Closing the book, I just feel real and hopeful.

I will not say this story is a tragedy, and I hate when people generalise it as a book where
everyone died except for Laila, Tariq and their children. Indeed, a depressing and melancholy
mood is seemed to be perpetuated throughout the book, which has a large time frame spanning
over decades (making it also a thought-provoking historical fiction); we agonise over the
misfortune of the many characters, over their fickle lives under the most evil torture of the
human rights.

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It’s not the kind of affliction or anguish that is easy to resonate with, as lives as well as the social
norms in Afghanistan are unfamiliar to most of us. But somehow, no matter how this book is
portrayed as a fiction, from deep inside my heart, I know this must be the reality, the bare truth
of a brutal period of modern history.

The first reason, I assume, is that Hosseini is a master of story-telling. When I marvelled at
Mariam’s courage to stand up against Rasheed, moved by Laila and Tariq’s unfading hope for a
brighter future, I wonder, aren’t they just people who cannot be more ordinary? Every time when
a person died in the story, especially those who are not the crucial roles and their deaths were
merely mentioned in one line, it occurred to me that there must be thousands of Lailas, Tariqs
and Mariams in Afghanistan. Each one of them had been the hero in his/her own story. That’s
why at the end of the story, I felt so real and so empowered – I might be the hero of my own
story.

The second reason, is that every character is created so real that you cannot simply love or hate
anyone. I was really surprised that I didn’t cry for many of the sad scenes until I read about
Jalil’s Disney tape and his letter. Jalil, the one who deeply broke or, more precisely, devastate
Mariam’s heart, who once been a cold businessman and gave away his daughter without a dither
turned out to be a father who really cared for Mariam for all those years, who still regretted the
Disney movie he didn’t take her to watch. He realised that at the end of his life, the thing that
should be cherished most is the opportunity of being a father, the thing that should be embraced
most tightly is his daughter. This person, is just so real. Even Rasheed, who is the major cause of
the two women’s misfortune, has showed his fatherly love when Zalmai was born. Everyone in
this story is a three-dimensional person; none of them is perfect, but each one of them can be a
splendid sun shining in the sky of Afghanistan.
“Real” is definitely not the only feeling I have after reading it, the most overwhelming one must
be “hopeful”. Hosseini has never intended to depress anyone since the very first beginning when
he wrote down the title of book – “A thousand splendid suns”. Though the walls may seemed to
be ashen and rough, I can still see the thousand splendid suns hide behind the walls. This is
exactly the motto, the spirit that inspired everyone in this book to keep on struggling. For
Mariam, she was able to have “a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate beginnings.” because she
“has loved and been loved back”. For Laila and Tariq, their splendid suns are their children,
children in Afghanistan and each other. For Laila’s Babi, his splendid suns are Laila and her
Mammy. For Jalil, at the end of his life, he still possessed hope to take Mariam in his arms “as he
should have all those years ago”. Even for Rasheed, he once lost a splendid sun in his life, that’s
why he would never let it go once Zalmai was born, who turned out to be his new splendid sun.
Yes, most of them died. But they were lucky; they died with hope.

In the end, I feel so real and hopeful that I almost see a thousand splendid suns shining in the sky
now.