A Thousand Splendid Suns

This is the book, which shifted my level of reading to the next level.
And I have this feeling that it would always remain in my all time faves list.

In this novel, the autor Mr.Khaled Hosseini, focuses on mothers and daughters, and friendships between women. The story starts off programmatically and gains speed and emotional power as it slowly unfurls.

Let me take the description from the book itself to summarize it :

"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..."

Quoting a few notable words from the book ..

"Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting."
"A man's heart is a wretched, wretched thing. It isn't like a mother's womb. It won't bleed. It won't stretch to make room for you."
"A society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated..."
"Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always."
"Boys treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly."
"Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason."
"And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. And whenever those twin poisonous flowers began to sprout in the parched land of that field, Mariam uprooted them."
"One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.”