In “A Thousand Splendid Suns” (Riverhead, 2007), the follow-up to his popular novel “The Kite Runner,” Khaled Hosseini has written another powerful, sorrowful tale about families in Afghanistan caught up in their country’s tumultuous politics:
“They would live in a small house on the edge of some town they’d never heard of, Mariam said, or in a remote village where the road was narrow and unpaved but lined with all manner of plants and shrubs. Maybe there would be a path to take, a path that led to a grass field where children could play, or maybe a graveled road would take them to a clear blue lake where trout swam and reeds poked through the surface. They would raise sheep and chickens, and they would make bread together and teach the children to read. They would make new lives for themselves — peaceful, solitary lives — and there the weight of all they’d endured would lift from them, and they would be deserving of all the happiness and simple prosperity they would find.”
