A Thousand Splendid Suns

survived the fire, but his store did not. The fire took the adjacent fabric store as well, a secondhand clothing store, a small ...

"I swear you're going to make me kill you, Laila," he said, panting. Then he stormed out of the house. When the money ran out, ...

Mariam had a view of the Polytechnic Institute, and, beyond that, the old Khair khana district and the road to Mazar. To the sou ...

hours, waiting for her, now and then calling her name, just as she had once called his name outside his house. Mariam had parted ...

"There's a groundskeeper here. I think he's lived here all of his life." "Yes, ask him, please." "Call back tomorrow." Mariam sa ...

"I'm sorry to have bothered you," Mariam said, weeping soundlessly into the phone. She saw Jalil waving to her, skipping from st ...

Laila n a paper bag, Aziza packed these things: her flowered shirt and her lone pair of socks, her mismatched wool gloves, a ...

And, more than once, How long do I have to stay? They stopped two blocks from the squat, barracks style building. "Zalmai and I ...

"I'll come and see you," Laila said. "All the time. Look at me, Aziza. I'll come and see you. I'm your mother. If it kills me, I ...

old joke, that you can't stretch a leg in Herat without poking a poet in the rear." Next to Laila, Aziza snorted. Zaman feigned ...

fed and clothed. That much I promise you." Laila nodded. "All right?" He was smiling companionably. "But don't cry, hamshira Don ...

breath. Maybe tomorrow I'll feel better, or the day after. We'll see." He never bothered to feign a single raspy breath. Often, ...

had knitting needles and balls of yarn ready, she said, in case of a Taliban inspection. "We put the books away and pretend to k ...

"You're getting so smart," Mariam said "So much smarter than your dumb khala" Aziza's face glowed, broadened. "You're not dumb, ...

Are you eating? Sleeping all right? Eating. Sleeping too. Yes. We had lamb last night Maybe it was last week. When Aziza spoke l ...

Aziza chose a gum ball machine the same coin could be inserted to get candy, then retrieved from the flap door coin return below ...

Mariam pstairs, in Mariam's room, Zalmai was wound up. He bounced his new rubber basketball around for a while, on the floor ...

Laila ariq said that one of the men who shared his cell had a cousin who'd been publicly flogged once for painting flamingos ...

Laila thought of Tariq's mother, her unhurried manners, the clever smiles, the dull purple wig. And his father, with his squinty ...

Laila meant this less as a joke than as a surreptitious entry into another line of talk, such as who else was there with him wor ...