I have finished reading this Hosseini’s second novel and was not disappointed. The Kite Runner is very good, A Thousand Splendid Suns was even better. It is a gripping story, well told, and about a subject, a religion and a country we in the west know far too little about.

Told through the eyes of two Afghan women, we travel through roughly thirty years of Afghan history, encountering every twist and turn of the tortuous events of one of the most unstable periods in the country’s memory; through invasion, revolution, counter-invasion, famine and drought and finally, what may have turned out to be the false dawn of hope.

This is not a book for the faint-hearted, or for those who don’t want their preconceived ideas of Afghanistan shattered. It is raw and uncompromising, but tells a gripping and disturbing story with emotion, truth and guts but without sentiment. I found it high on the list of books I would wish to read again.