Relief comes when Laila gives birth to a boy, but it’s short-lived. Rasheed grows increasingly hostile, even frenzied, after an escape by the women is foiled. The heart of the novel is the gradual bonding between the girl-mother and the much older woman. Rasheed has his own agenda the 14-year-old will become his second wife, over Mariam’s objections, and give him an heir, but to his disgust Laila has a daughter, Aziza in time, he’ll realize Tariq is the father. The two storylines merge when Rasheed and Mariam shelter the solitary Laila.

Before he leaves for Pakistan, Tariq and Laila make love soon after, her parents are killed by a rocket. The Soviets have gone, and rival warlords are tearing the city apart. It’s the eighth year of Soviet occupation-bad for the nation, but good for women, who are granted unprecedented freedoms. In 1987, the story switches to a neighbor, nine-year-old Laila, her playmate Tariq and her parents. Mariam lives in fear of him, especially after numerous miscarriages. Rasheed is a deeply conventional man who insists that Mariam wear a burqa, though many women are going uncovered (it’s 1974). Her father then married off the 15-year-old to Rasheed, a 40ish shoemaker in Kabul, hundreds of miles away. Mariam’s childhood ended abruptly when her mother hanged herself. Her mother was a housekeeper for a rich businessman in Herat, Afghanistan, until he impregnated and banished her. This Afghan-American author follows his debut ( The Kite Runner, 2003) with a fine risk-taking novel about two victimized but courageous Afghan women.

Under a thousand splendid suns