
At the beginning, A Thousand Splendid Suns did little to win me over. Its characters seemed shallow, transparent: Mariam’s mother was vindictive and manipulative, her actions and reactions shockingly outsized. Mariam marries Rasheed, who turned out to be exactly the kind of one-note bully I expected him to be. Even when Laila entered the story and began her slow, awkward, inevitable dance with Tariq, I was still not convinced. But then the communist regime fell…