Books Like A Thousand Splendid Suns: 10 Heart-Wrenching Reads to Devour Next

A Thousand Splendid Suns is the book that made a generation of readers care about Afghanistan, and it did it through two women. Mariam, the illegitimate daughter of a rich man, and Laila, a bright girl from a loving Kabul family a generation younger, are both forced into marriage to the same brutal man, and the novel follows them from the 1960s through the Soviet years, the civil war and the Taliban. Hosseini called it a mother-daughter story, and that is what stays with you: the friendship that grows between the two wives, the sacrifices, and the plain, propulsive prose that makes four decades of history read like a single held breath. Nobody finishes it dry-eyed.

We looked for books that carry the same weight the same way: women's lives under pressure, a country's history told through one household, and prose that moves rather than lingers. Most are novels; two are non-fiction, for the reader who came out of Kabul needing to know how much of it is true. Several deal with domestic violence, as the anchor does, and we keep every description at the level of the publisher's own blurb. There is one Hosseini here, because after this book you will want to know where he started.

What to read after A Thousand Splendid Suns

The Pearl That Broke Its Shell by Nadia Hashimi

In 2007 Kabul, Rahima's family has no sons, so she becomes a bacha posh, a girl dressed and treated as a boy so she can go to school and to the market. Her aunt tells her the story of her great-great-grandmother Shekiba, who a century earlier lived as a man and stood guard in a king's harem, and the two women's lives run side by side through forced marriages and hard choices. Two Afghan women, two timelines, one hard-won thread of hope handed down: the single closest book to Mariam and Laila we know.

Find The Pearl That Broke Its Shell at Ever After Books

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

Amir grows up privileged in 1970s Kabul with Hassan, the son of his father's servant, as his closest friend, until one winter afternoon at a kite tournament he fails Hassan in a way he will spend his life trying to atone for. The same country and the same decades of coup, invasion and Taliban rule, told through a boy and then a man, and the book Hosseini wrote first. If you have read it you know why it is here; if you have not, it is the obvious next step, and a very different one.