![]() ![]() He noted the anticipation for his second book when writing it, compared to The Kite Runner wherein "no one was waiting for it." He also found his second novel to be more "ambitious" than the first due to its larger cast of characters its dual focus on Mariam and Laila and its covering a multi-generational-period of nearly forty-five-years in total. ![]() Hosseini disclosed that in some ways, A Thousand Splendid Suns was more difficult to write than his first novel, The Kite Runner. "I hope the book offers emotional subtext to the image of the burqa-clad woman walking down a dusty street in Kabul." Though no one woman that I met in Kabul inspired either Laila or Mariam, their voices, faces, and their incredible stories of survival were always with me, and a good part of my inspiration for this novel came from their collective spirit." Writing Their life stories were truly heartbreaking.When I began writing A Thousand Splendid Suns, I found myself thinking about those resilient women over and over. ![]() I remember watching them walking in pairs up the street, trailed by their children in ragged clothes, and wondering how life had brought them to that point.I spoke to many of those women in Kabul. There was a whole facet of Afghan society which I hadn't touched on in The Kite Runner, an entire landscape that I felt was fertile with story ideas.In the spring of 2003, I went to Kabul, and I recall seeing these burqa-clad women sitting at street corners, with four, five, six children, begging for change. All the major characters, except perhaps for Amir's wife Soraya, were men. That first novel was a male-dominated story. "I had been entertaining the idea of writing a story of Afghan women for some time after I'd finished writing The Kite Runner. When asked what led him to write a novel centered on two Afghan women, Hosseini responded: I realized that I had found not only the right line for the scene, but also an evocative title in the phrase 'a thousand splendid suns,' which appears in the next-to-last stanza." Inspiration Hosseini explained "I was searching for English translations of poems about Kabul, for use in a scene where a character bemoans leaving his beloved city, when I found this particular verse. The title of the book comes from a line in Josephine Davis' translation of the poem "Kabul", by the 17th-century Iranian poet Saib Tabrizi: " Every street of Kabul is enthralling to the eye Through the bazaars, caravans of Egypt pass One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs And the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls" Columbia Pictures purchased film rights in 2007, and a theatrical adaptation of the book premiered on February 1, 2017, at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, California. During its first week on sale, it sold over one million copies. It continues some of the themes used in his previous work, such as familial dynamics, but instead focusing primarily on female characters and their roles in contemporary Afghan society.Ī Thousand Splendid Suns was released on May 22, 2007, and received favorable widespread critical acclaim from Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Booklist, and became a number one New York Times Best Seller for fifteen weeks following its release. Hosseini has remarked that he regards the novel as a "mother-daughter story" in contrast to The Kite Runner, which he considers a "father-son story" and friendships between men. Laila, born a generation later, lives a relatively privileged life, but her life intersects with Mariam's when a similar tragedy forces her to accept a marriage proposal from Mariam's husband. Mariam, an illegitimate teenager from Herat, is forced to marry a shoemaker from Kabul after a family tragedy. A Thousand Splendid Suns is a 2007 novel by Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini, following the huge success of his bestselling 2003 debut The Kite Runner. ![]()
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