Khaled Hosseini

In his brilliant debut, The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini mesmerized us with his evocative portraits and beautiful bittersweet story. Now he returns to tumultuous Afghanistan to tell the tale of an unlikely friendship and an indestructible love...

The child of an illicit affair, Mariam was raised by her single mother on the outskirts of town. At 14, she was sent to Kabul and sold in marriage to Rasheed, a widower decades older than she. But now after twenty years and no offspring, Rasheed takes a beautiful teenager, Laila, as his second wife. While Mariam despises Laila and the baby born months after her arrival, Rasheed's cruelty and the explosive changes in the country soon draw the women together. 
--front flap

A thousand splendid suns

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Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.

jade shen

Manasi Gajjalapurna

Laila watches Mariam glue strands of yarn onto her doll's head. In a few years, this little girl will be a woman who will make small demands on life, who will never burden others, who will never let on that she too has had sorrows, disappointments, dreams that have been ridiculed. A woman who will be like a rock in a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied but 

 by the turbulence that washes over her. Already Laila sees something behind this young girl's eyes, something deep in her core, that neither Rasheed nor the Taliban will be able to break. Something as hard and unyielding as a block of limestone. Something that, in the end, will be 

sin h.

Ilse

Jenna-Lee Gordon

"Look at me, Mariam." Reluctantly, Mariam did. Nana said, "Learn this now and learn it well, my daughter: Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Miriam

Like a compass facing north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.

And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. And whenever those twin poisonous flowers began to sprout in the parched land of that field, Mariam uprooted them. She uprooted them and ditched them before they took hold.

But the game involves only male names. Because, if it's a girl, Laila has already named her.

She thought of Aziza's stutter, and of what Aziza had said earlier about fractures and powerful collisions deep down and how sometimes all we see on the surface is a slight tremor.

She wished she could see Laila again, wished to hear the clangor of her laugh, to sit with her once more for a pot of chai and leftover halwa under a starlit sky. She mourned that she would never see Aziza grow up, would not see the beautiful young woman that she would one day become, would not get to paint her hands with henna and toss noqul candy at her wedding. She would never play with Aziza's children. She would have liked that very much, to be old and play with Aziza's children.

Mariam wished for so much in those final moments. Yet as she closed her eyes, it was not regret any longer but a sensation of abundant peace that washed over her. She thought of her entry into this world, the harami child of a lowly villager, an unintended thing, a pitiable, regrettable accident. A weed. And yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. A person of consequence at last. No. It was not so bad , Mariam thought, that she should die this way. Not so bad. This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate beginnings.

Regret... when it comes to you, Mariam jo, I have oceans of it.

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