Longing to be real

. To endure. It's our lot in life."

But Mariam continues to hope. She yearns to be part of her father's legitimate family, and one day an act of over-enthusiastic, childlike indiscretion leads to the collapse of her world. Orphaned and then abandoned, she is hurriedly married off to Rasheed, a middle-aged businessman, and sent to live in Kabul, where, as the years pass, her dreams and ambitions fade away.

Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns is a sensitively told, if slightly uneven, story about the crushing of the strong-willed Mariam's spirit and the opportunity she gets, decades later, to validate her life by helping another innocent""a young girl named Laila, Rasheed's second wife. The stories of these two women are set against the backdrop of an Afghanistan lurching from one era of instability to another. The narrative moves between 1974 and 2003, a period that includes the military rule of President Daoud Khan, the long years of Soviet occupation, the internecine fighting that turn swathes of the country into a war zone and its civilians into target practice for rocket bombers, and the emergence of the Taliban in the mid-1990s.

Hosseini's evocation of life in Kabul over these strife-filled years is as absorbing as it was in his first novel The Kite Runner, a huge international success. Some of the flaws of that book are on view here also. The Kite Runner was a near-perfect example of the cosily satisfying, middlebrow work of fiction with appeal for casual readers who wouldn't normally plough through books about "heavy topics". The first Afghan novel to be published originally in English, it opened a window to a period and setting most of us knew very little about, and did this in accessible language, and through a page-turner of a plot. However, it was occasionally manipulative, carefully underlining every point for the reader, and some of this persists in A Thousand Splendid Suns. The image of an aged Jalil Khan looking up at Mariam's window, hoping for a glimpse of the daughter he cast away years ago, would be poignant enough on its own, but Hosseini must elbow-nudge the reader thus: "he'd stood there for hours, waiting for her, now and then calling her name, just as she had once called his name outside his house..."

But happily, such simplifications are fewer here than in the earlier book. Much of the power of A Thousand Splendid Suns resides in its small, almost throwaway observations about the nature of relationships, societal and family structures: such as Laila bitterly reflecting that people "shouldn't be allowed to have new children if they'd given all their love away to the old ones", and Mariam's sense that her mother doesn't want her to find the happiness and freedom she never had herself. This latter idea is an acute summarising of the ambivalent, complex relationship between many parents and children in conservative societies that are straining for liberalness.

There are other striking little vignettes. For instance, when the free-spirited Mariam and Laila are each coerced into wearing a burqa for the first time (many years apart), they are surprised at how secure they feel; given their recent experiences, it's comforting that people can no longer see their faces, look into their eyes, scrutinise and judge them. I also liked the way Hosseini uses the Pinocchio tale to bookend his novel""the story of the puppet who wants to be a "real boy" has parallels with Mariam and Laila (and other women in this society) being denied human rights and control over their own lives.

In Hosseini's work, form usually takes second place to content: even if the writing is patchy and overwrought, most readers are swept along by the sheer emotional sweep of a setting where people live in constant fear, and where women have few rights even during the relatively good times. But this new novel shows that he has grown as a writer, learnt something about restraint and about letting a story tell itself.

A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS

Khaled Hosseini
Bloomsbury
Price: £5.99; Pages: 372