A more subtle, and at the same time heavier story, in comparison to the first book of Hosseini, who here sets off to recount the lives of two Afghani women of a seemingly different background that after a while become parallel and then intersect because of a series of tragedies, personal and national -and this intersection becomes also the beginning of new ones.
At the same time, Hosseini tells the story of Afghanistan since the '70s, at first speaking about the period in which his first book took place, but from a different perspective, and then reaching until the first years after the devastating so-called "War on Terror". Hosseini tries to understand what happened to his country, what the Soviet Union, the mujahideen or the Taliban brought to it and why, while he tries to avoid -successfully most of the time- to become judgmental with them, apart from the cases where people get abused or killed, although it's obvious he has grudges against all of them, and especially against the Taliban. It's interesting, for example, how he stresses the fact that with the Soviets the life of women became a little more sufferable for them and they had more rights in education or work.
More than anything else though, "A Thousand Splendid Suns" is a strongly feminist book, although it avoids masterfully being preachy; through it we see how women are still suffering from patriarchy, ignorance and fear of change in places like Afghanistan. The -not so funny- thing is that reading the book and coming from Greece, I didn't find all these as something remote and far away from my own experiences: things like those that happened to the women in the book could happen even in my country, at least two or three generations ago (and sometimes less).
A very good book, hard and tender at the same time.