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408 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2007
She remembered Nana saying once that each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. That all the sighs drifted up the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. As a reminder of how people like us suffer, she'd said. How quietly we endure all that falls upon us.Staggeringly beautiful and deep and rich and sad and frightening and infuriating. There’s a lot I want to say about this book and so I cry your pardon if this review is a bit of a rambler. You should definitely read this book. I’ll probably repeat this again, but I want to make sure I don’t forget to say it. Buy the book and read it.
She lived in fear of his shifting moods, his volatile temperament, his insistence on steering even mundane exchanges down a confrontational path that, on occasion, he would resolve with punches, slaps, kicks, and sometimes try to make amends for with polluted apologies, and sometimes not.The lives of these women is an epic journey in every sense of the word and I felt like I was on a journey of my own as I road along with them.
"The little girl looks up. Puts down the doll. Smiles. Laila jo?"
“One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,
Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.”
Mariam, on the the other hand is the illegitimate daughter of a businessman Jalil . She faces a lot of social problems and rejection but she is headstrong and the real hero of the story.
‘they would make new lives for themselves - peaceful, solitary lives - and there the weight of all that they had endured would lift from them, and they would be deserving of all the happiness and simple prosperity they would find.’
”learn this now and learn it well: like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. always.”
”she is the noor of my eyes and the sultan of my heart.”