A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini

The tragic story of Afghanistan between 1960 and 2003 is told through the lives of two women.

Mariam, born out of wedlock and branded a ‘harami’, lives with her damaged mother in a ramshackle hut on the outskirts of Herat. Her father, already with three wives and ten legitimate children, does visit once a week to receive adulation from young Mariam and abuse from her mother. When the mother dies, Mariam assumes she will be taken in. Wrong. Aged fourteen she is married off to Rasheed, a shoemaker thrice her age, and is shipped off 650km to Kabul. Imagine her new life – no need, Hosseini tells it as it is.

Bigger events are at play as in 1978 the communist revolution takes place. The same year, down the road from Mariam’s house, Laila is born. She has a progressive father and benefits from the new regime’s programme of secular education (including for girls) for a while at least.

But not everyone in the country approves of the changes. They see the Russian support as invasion, communism as an atheistic attack on their religion, and call for Jihad. Laila’s older brothers answer the call, only to fall before the Russians are driven out. She barely knew them, but has a surrogate brother in schoolfriend, Tariq. As the friends gain puberty, friendship develops to love.

As the Russians pull out, Hell descends on Kabul as rival warlords fight for supremacy and control. People die and disappear. Laila needs a lifeboat and the shoemaker up the road, Rasheed, now in his sixties, makes her an offer she is in no position to refuse. Thus, Mariam and Laila are forced into an uncomfortable menage a trois.

The harsh realities of life in Kabul and a common violent enemy in their shared husband, pushes them into a mutual dependency that develops into trust and sisterly support. And that bond is tested, as events spiral, and conditions deteriorate in the city.

It is told with passion, pace, and prose that lays bare the horrors yet ennobles the struggle of the women. Tragic, yes; uplifting, maybe; thought-provoking, definitely.

Heroes – Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry retells the stories of the Greek heroes in his inimical style. And these are mortals, not gods, so their foibles are fair game, enabling Fry to tease out their personalities as well as their activities. The focus is mainly on the macho exploits of Perseus, Heracles, Orpheus, Jason, Oedipus, and Theseus, but in a nod to gender equality, Atalanta (a match for most of them) gets an airing.

The tales all tend to involve destiny, uncertain parenthood, great deeds, loves loved greatly but easily gotten over, fierce monsters of legendary descent, and the odd benign creature such as a winged horse or golden-fleeced ram. The gods, of course, are ever present in the background, begetting, seducing, challenging, tormenting, and otherwise interfering with their mortal puppets as they jostle for position in the Olympian pantheon.

It is tremendous fun and very illuminating as Fry expertly treads the fine line between easy-flowing prose and scholarly erudition. Footnotes give an option for more of the latter.

Just splendid as both an introduction to the Greek heroes and as a refreshing refresher.

The Bell in the Lake – Lars Mytting

In the beginning there were two bells, the Sister Bells, so called as they were cast in memorial to conjoined twins, Halfrid and Grunhild Hekne. The girls, despite their situation, managed well enough with the rigours of rural Norwegian life and excelled at weaving where their four arms moved in perfect harmony to produce beautiful tapestries. They fell ill and died young, expiring at their loom, working on one last masterpiece, completed by Grunhild with Halfrid dead beside her.

That was two hundred years before the story begins, on New Years Day 1880, when the Sister Bells call the faithful of Butangen to mass. Among them is young Astrid Hekne who, while resigned to her family’s subsistence level existence, has broader horizons. Better educated than most and fuelled by her reading of the parson’s discarded newspapers, she longs to travel. She also longs for the new parson, a young priest named Kai Schweigaard. He has feelings for her, too, but with the church mission and a fiancé back in civilization, they must be repressed. Anyway, he has work to do - the ancient stave church is cold, draughty, and too small. It needs replacing.

Fortunately, it has historic value. Some well-connected Germans wish to relocate it in Dresden as a cultural icon. Enter young architectural student, Gerhard Schonauer, to record its structure and supervise its dismantling, storage, and export.

We have a love triangle. Astrid obviously attracts both men with her good looks and feisty demeanour. She reciprocates their tentative attentions, but it is complicated. Their shared mission to remove the old church, and more importantly the bells forged for her ancestors, is anathema to her.

It is slow burning and moody with repressed emotion. The landscape and the turning seasons form more than a backdrop; folk in Butangen live and die by the weather. As the snow melts, and the sap rises, things begin to move. Astrid has a plan to save the bells, but can she get her suitors to cooperate? There again, maybe the bells have a plan for Astrid.

There is resolution of sorts, but as one story ends, green shoots of another couple emerge. As the first volume of a projected trilogy, it may take some time and lots more pleasurable reading before the final fate of the Sister Bells are known.