This chapter-by-chapter summary contains plot spoilers!

Buy on Amazon: A Thousand Splendid Suns

Navigate the Summary Parts: Part 1: Mariam waits for her dad Part 2: Mariam follows her dad Part 3: Mariam gets married Part 4: Mariam gets pregnant Part 5: Young Laila misses Tariq Part 6: Laila goes on a field trip Part 7: Plans to evacuate Kabul Part 8: Laila gets married Part 9: The Taliban shows up Part 10: Conclusion

A Thousand Splendid Suns
by Khaled Hosseini

Book Summary (from the inside flap):

"A Thousand Splendid Suns is a breathtaking story set against the volatile events of Afghanistan's last thirty years -- from the Soviet invasion to the reign of the Taliban to post-Taliban rebuilding -- that puts the violence, fear, hope, and faith of this country in intimate, human terms.  It is a tale of two generations of characters brought jarringly together by the tragic sweep of war, where personal lives -- the struggle to survive, raise a family, find happiness -- are inextricable from the history playing out around them..."

Go to the End of the summary of A Thousand Splendid Suns

People and Places: (purple = viewpoint character)

• Aziza - daughter of Laila and Tariq
• Fariba - neighbor to Mariam, wife to Hakim, mother to Laila
• Hakim - a former teacher, husband to Fariba and father to Laila
• Herat – cosmopolitan city in western Afghanistan where Jalil owns much property
• Jalil – Mariam's father who has three wives and nine legitimate children
• Kabul - capital city of Afghanistan where Laila and Mariam live
• Laila - born in 1978, daughter of Fariba and Hakim, in love with Tariq
• Mariam – born in 1959, illegitimate daughter of Jalil
• Mullah Faizullah – elderly Koran tutor who is kind to Mariam
• Nana – Mariam's mother
• Rasheed - older man who becomes Mariam's husband and takes her to Kabul.
• Tariq - Laila's friend and lover, father of Aziza
• Zalmai - son of Laila and Rasheed

Title: A Thousand Splendid Suns comes from a poem quoted on page 172 about Kabul, written by Saib-e-Tabrizi in the 17th century, that contains the lines:  "One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls."

Part One.  Pages 1 – 18: (Brought to you by kat impatientreader.com)
In Chapter 1 we meet Mariam, the illegitimate 5 year-old daughter of Jalil, one of the richest men in the city of Herat in western Afghanistan. Mariam lives with her mother Nana in a hovel outside the city of Herat and near the village of Gul Daman. One day Mariam accidentally breaks a sugar bowl from a tea set that is Nana's only inheritance from her own mother, and Nana calls Mariam a harami (bastard).  Mariam knows her bitter mother dislikes her, but she adores her shallow father even though he only shows up for a couple of hours each Tuesday to tell her stories. He never brings her ice cream though he tells her stories about all the kids who get free ice cream at his cinema.

Back story:  Mariam's mother Nana was Jalil's housekeeper who was disowned by her own father and banished from Jalil's employment when she got pregnant with Mariam. Nana's own father moved to Iran to escape her disgrace and never showed his face again. Jalil subsequently set Nana up in a hovel outside of the city. He told his three wives that Nana forced herself on him. Nana is so bitter that she insists to Mariam that her own father should have done the "honorable thing" and executed both Nana and Mariam.

In Chapter 2, Nana elaborates on more stuff that poor Mariam doesn't want to hear. Apparently Nana almost got married at age 15 to a parakeet salesman. She got fitted for a green gown.  But then a week before the wedding she developed what clearly sounds like epilepsy, which would plague her for the rest of her life. No one knows about epilepsy; instead, they think that she's possessed by a jinni. This caused the parakeet salesman to call off the wedding. No one wanted to marry Nana after that.

Much later on, according to Nana, Jalil would build their hovel outside the city with his own hands as penance for getting her pregnant. Supposedly he provided no help for Nana in her pregnancy and she had to lie on the floor alone for two days, coping with labor pangs before giving birth. Supposedly he shrugged off the news of Mariam's birth and spent an extra two weeks vacationing with friends. Nana tells this version of events often and poor Mariam always feels obligated to apologize for being born.

However, in Jalil's version of events, Nana experienced a quick and relatively easy delivery in a hospital for which he paid, and he was overjoyed to hear of Mariam's birth.  Mariam knows which story she would rather believe. According to Nana, Mariam got named after Nana's mother. According to Jalil, he picked Mariam's name, which means tuberose.  Poor little Mariam asks if it's his favorite flower, and he says, "Well, one of."

In Chapter 3, Mariam remembers her half-brothers showing up once a month with a wheelbarrow piled high with provisions from Jalil. The boys would wheel it along the rugged track to Mariam and Nana's hovel. Nana would lounge outside and pepper the boys with insults and ineptly-thrown rocks.  The boys would never answer though sometimes they would wave to Mariam. Mariam always felt sorry for them and wanted to wave back, but never did because she knew that Nana would see it as a betrayal. Once, to please Nana, she yells at one of her half-brothers that he has a mouth shaped like a lizard's ass. Nana enjoys that.

Apparently Nana only gets a few visitors at her hovel. Mariam's favorite is the elderly Koran tutor Mullah Faizullah.  He comes twice a week to give her basic religious instruction, and it is he who teaches her to read. Mariam has overheard that her half-sisters (Jalil's legitimate daughters) get to go to school. She begs the Mullah to persuade Nana to let her attend school.  The Mullah tries, but Nana cuts him off.  She claims that her daughter is all she has in the world, and she will not let her go. Then she states that the only skill a woman needs in life is not taught in schools: that's endurance.
Go to the next part of the synopsis for A Thousand Splendid Suns
Go to the Chapter-by-Chapter Summary of The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Go to the Index of Summaries
What to Read Next!
Go to the Current Novel on Twenty-Pages-a-Day!