Khaled Hosseini's 'Thousand Splendid Suns'
Khaled Hosseini, a physician and author, was born in Kabul and lives in the United States. John Dolan hide caption
Enemies No Longer
Khaled Hosseini reads an excerpt from A Thousand Splendid Suns.
Khaled Hosseini's 'Thousand Splendid Suns'
Read an Excerpt
No one was more surprised than Khaled Hosseini when his first novel, set in Afghanistan, became a bestseller in America. The Kite Runner told the story of two boys growing up in Kabul, inseparable until a betrayal — followed by war and flight from war — tore them apart.
His new novel is A Thousand Splendid Suns, a title that comes from a 17th-century poem — an ode to the city of Kabul. In it, Hosseini tells the story of two girls who grow close as women — unlikely friends who are brought together in the chaos of war.
Hosseini was born in Kabul, the son of a diplomat and high-school teacher. At the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, when Hosseini was 11, his father was working in the Afghan embassy in Paris. The family requested and received political asylum in the United States, where Hosseini later went to medical school and became a physician.
For Hosseini, Afghanistan "became this distant place suddenly for me," he tells Renee Montagne. "I emotionally kind of lost touch with what was going on. The writing of that first novel, The Kite Runner just kind of brought it all back to me."
Hosseini returned to Kabul in 2003.
"I think that when I went there and I saw the enormity of the suffering that people had gone through.... In some ways, you wonder why you were spared all of that and whether you have made good use of the good fortune that for sheer luck you've been granted," he says.
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A Thousand Splendid Suns
Excerpt: 'A Thousand Splendid Suns'
It's the whistling," Laila said to Tariq, "the damn whistling, I hate more than anything."
Tariq nodded knowingly.
It wasn't so much the whistling itself, Laila thought later, but the seconds between the start of it and impact. The brief and interminable time of feeling suspended. The not knowing. The waiting. Like a defendant about to hear the verdict.
Often it happened at dinner, when she and Babi were at the table. When it started, their heads snapped up. They listened to the whistling, forks in midair, unchewed food in their mouths. Laila saw the reflection of their half-lit faces in the pitch-black window, their shadows unmoving on the wall. The whistling. Then the blast, blissfully elsewhere, followed by an expulsion of breath and the knowledge that they had been spared for now while somewhere else, amid cries and choking clouds of smoke, there was a scrambling, a barehanded frenzy of digging, of pulling from the debris, what remained of a sister, a brother, a grandchild.
But the flip side of being spared was the agony of wondering who hadn't. After every rocket blast, Laila raced to the street, stammering a prayer, certain that, this time, surely this time, it was Tariq they would find buried beneath the rubble and smoke.
At night, Laila lay in bed and watched the sudden white flashes reflected in her window. She listened to the rattling of automatic gunfire and counted the rockets whining overhead as the house shook and flakes of plaster rained down on her from the ceiling. Some nights, when the light of rocket fire was so bright a person could read a book by it, sleep never came. And, if it did, Laila's dreams were suffused with fire and detached limbs and the moaning of the wounded.
Morning brought no relief. The muezzin's call for namaz rang out, and the Mujahideen set down their guns, faced west, and prayed. Then the rugs were folded, the guns loaded, and the mountains fired on Kabul, and Kabul fired back at the mountains, as Laila and the rest of the city watched as helpless as old Santiago watching the sharks take bites out of his prize fish.
Excerpted from A Thousand Splendid Suns copyright 2007 by Khaled Hosseini. Published by Riverhead Books.