Though not as popular as Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, "A Thousand Splendid Suns" is an extremely important novel with a huge number of interesting themes which are explored in its rather short amount of pages. In this family saga and moving tale of friendship, hate and love at the same time, Hosseini abbreviates several decades of important history into a fictional story spanning more than thirty years. 
 It's a depressing novel, consisting of a rather dark atmosphere and many chapters which will leave you gasping for breath due to the sheer amount of brutality and inhumanity some characters seem to love carrying out. What I found most intriguing in this novel was the way Hosseini managed to provide a lot of information about the history of Afghanistan, a country which has been dominated by war and destruction for such a long time. At times he came close to sounding like a nonfictional correspondent of the events with his prose, but fortunately it never felt like the author was trying to pour infodump out on his readers. 
 "A Thousand Splendid Suns" is a tough book to review, simply because it deals with so many socially relevant issues that it feels like nitpicking to talk about the writing and the characterization. It's an important book which I can only encourage everyone to read as soon as possible, considering that it offers plenty food for your thoughts and leaves you pondering about themes and questions which you may not have thought about in such detailed precision before. My biggest problem with the novel was mostly about the main characters Laila and Mariam, who - thanks to the rather detached and neutral writing style - felt very difficult to connect or relate to. I started rooting for these characters throughout the course of the novel, though that's rather obvious to say considering the fate these two women had to endure in the course of the plot. 
 As a final note, I think this book - or Hosseini's other books in general - should receive more attention by the public. Nowadays, especially here in Germany, there is a lot of displeasure directed towards foreigners and their cultures, not necessarily people from Afghanistan, but the Middle East and Far East in general. Hosseini manages to introduces his readers who are not familiar with the cultures described in this novel to a different world, a world I personally didn't know as much about before reading "A Thousand Splendid Suns" (and still wouldn't consider myself knowing a lot about). Khaled Hosseini's writing transports the important message that no matter where we come from, we are still all humans. Here in Germany and probably in many other places on our planet as well, people often tend to forget that coming from a different culture does not mean those humans are worth any less than we all are, and I think Hosseini's writing has the strength to remind more people of this fact. We are all human, and everyone deserves to be treated as such - no matter which cultural background you belong to.