Hosseini’s staggering, heartbreaking follow-up to his best-selling The Kite Runner is one of the most impressive novels about life during modern warfare ever written. Set in Afghanistan over the course of three decades, A Thousand Splendid Suns follows the marriage of 15-year-old Mariam to 40 year-old Rasheed, who beats her physically and abuses her mentally for her inability to produce a child. Eighteen years later, Rasheed takes a second wife, the beautiful but pugnacious Laila. Forced to stay inside the house together because of Islamic law, A Thousand Splendid Suns is both a damning indictment of Shari’a and a splendid picture of the lost potential of Afghanistan amid decades of almost permanent war.

The vast majority of the book takes place within two houses in Kabul and is centered around two women whose day-to-day lives are largely unaffected by the war with the Soviets, the mujhadeen and, eventually, the Taliban. And while there is plenty of death and bombs in this book, its focus, in the end, is on how and why people persevere.

Readers will scarcely be able to compare A Thousand Splendid Suns to Hosseini’s stunning debut novel, The Kite Runner. While both books focus on Afghanistan – The Kite Runner on people who leave, and A Thousand Splendid Suns on people who stay – the books have a completely different feel. The first hundred pages of The Kite Runner were interminably slow, to the point where one wondered why so many people loved the book. A Thousand Splendid Suns, by contrast, gets you hooked right out of the gate and keeps the story rolling at a thriller-like pace. Similarly, the ending to The Kite Runnewas a bit disappointing. Here, though, Hosseini puts together an ending that will reduce even the most hardened reader to tears of joy.

The only difficulty with A Thousand Splendid Suns is that there is almost too much heartbreak. Those of us accustomed to rooting for the good guys and watching the bad guys get their comeuppance will have a hard time coping with the seemingly never-ending downward spiral of Mariam and Laila’s life. At some points while reading, you will need an emotional break.

It is no wonder that Hosseini’s elegant prose has won over millions of readers. A Thousand Splendid Suns is the book that people will be talking about, and with good reason – simple, powerful and apropos, it should easily be remembered as one of the best books of 2007.