POIGNANT CHRONICLE
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (Bloomsbury)
With The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini provided us with a poignant glance into the tragic world of contemporary Afghanistan. Now, in A Thousand Splendid Suns, once again he revisits the tumultuous land of his birth to pierce the veil, both literally and figuratively, of daily life in Kabul.
A 15-year-old girl named Mariam is forced into marriage with a brutish cobbler, Rasheed, who is far older than her. Silently, for decades, she suffers as he maltreats her, enduring insult upon insult, until at last, much to her dismay, he takes another wife, a beautiful child-woman named Laila.
At first, Mariam and Laila are the bitterest of rivals, but then, once Laila gives birth to a daughter, Aziza, their enmity slowly metamorphoses into an implacable and solemn alliance, a deep and binding friendship born of shared hardship and cemented by the common adversities faced by these two very different women.
With an elegant volubility, Hosseini chronicles the lives of these movingly mundane heroines, following their vicissitudes and tribulations, contrasting their quotidian struggles and travails against the epic background of religious and political upheaval that wracked Afghanistan with the rise of the Taliban, and while his prose may possess a penchant to be somewhat mawkish at times, nevertheless, he does a more than creditable job of painting a heartrending and nostalgic portrait of Kabul in its colorful, vibrant heyday, before civil war and communal strife had reduced Babur’s fabled bower to a ruinous, war-scarred battleground.

A SUSPENSEFUL WHODUNIT
The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin (Faber and Faber)
Those of you who are devoted Orientalists may have had occasion to peruse Jason Goodwin’s excellent travelogue entitled On Foot to the Golden Horn, or his informative history of the Ottoman Empire titled Lord of the Horizons. In The Janissary Tree, he returns once more to the familiar setting of Istanbul to introduce us to a most unexpected sleuth.
On a cold night in 1836, two murders take place, the first a concubine of the Imperial Harem, and the second, a New Army officer found stuffed head first in a tin cauldron. And Hashim Togalu, a eunuch in the service of the Osmanli Sultan Mahmut II, middle-aged, melancholic, with a penchant for cooking and for gossip, is summoned to investigate the crimes.
What unfolds is a clever and compelling thriller as Hashim blusters and bumbles his way through the streets and souks of old Istanbul to uncover a conspiracy of epic proportions.
By combining remarkable scholarship with a deft turn of phrase, and blending a suspenseful, clever whodunit with the epic grandeur of historical fiction, Mr. Goodwin successfully educes the decadence and intrigue of Ottoman Turkey, and in Hashim, the eunuch, with his forlorn air of embittered resignation and fastidious mannerisms, he has created perhaps one of the more authentic and memorable detectives since Lindsay Davis’s Marcus Didius Falco and Ellis Peter’s Brother Cadfael.