So many brave young men have lost their lives in the Afghan War, that we want to learn about the place where they lost their lives, and to take some small consolation from the knowledge that they died in a good cause.Ī Thousand Splendid Suns certainly doesn’t mince details about the squalor and deprivation of Afghan life. I think they’re popular because they feature Afghan lives of great misery and the West needs to believe that it has liberated Afghanistan from degradation and given its people hope. (It makes one think of all the other places from which we in Australia never seem to see a book: when was the last time I saw a book from Syria? or from Ethiopia, Tibet, Guyana? Even the Balkans rarely make it into bookshops here in Australia, I was lucky that Istros Books sent me a couple for review or I’d never have read a book from Bosnia or Croatia).Īnyway, I think there’s more to the popularity of these Afghan books than the stories they tell. (There is also that novel by an Algerian author, The Swallows of Kabul, though I didn’t think that one was very good). It’s curious, isn’t it, how Afghanistan has morphed from a place most people had never heard of, to a country that features as the setting for bestsellers? A Thousand Splendid Suns is the bestselling successor to the bestselling Kite Runner, and in the airport bookshop yesterday I saw a new release by this author on the Top Tens shelf.
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