Khaled Hosseini, author of the award winning best-seller, The Kite Runner, has a new book with an Afghanistan setting. A Thousand Splendid Suns (25.95) tells the story of two women, the first wife, Mariam, and the second wife, Laila, of a violent middle aged man who takes each wife from her home in her mid-teens and keeps her subservient with regular beatings. “There was no cursing, no screaming, no pleading, no surprised yelps, only the systematic business of beating and being beaten”—a custom endorsed by culture and law. How Mariam’s resentment of the younger second wife turns to friendship and the collusion of two women against a social order just beginning to change is a compelling plot. The background covers thirty years of change in the country—from the Russian occupation, through the Civil War that followed and through the Taliban takeover. Despite all the pain and heartbreak, the novel is never depressing; Hosseini barrels through each grim development unflinchingly, seeking illumination. And his writing is as clear and pure as any classic of literature. Hosseini was born in Kabul, the son of a diplomat who received political asylum in California.

     The Pesthouse (24.95) by Jim Crace, an award winning British novelist, is an apocalyptic story of America in the far distant future when the government has collapsed and the forces of nature have succumbed to widespread pollution. Just as the European immigrants of the nineteenth century looked to the West as the “promised land,” now the population of what had been America is struggling to get to the ships on our eastern shore to sail to Europe where life will be a paradise for those who work. The two principal characters are Franklin, a young, larger-than-average farm-boy, and Margaret, an older woman (by a few years) who has been carried up the hill to a hut where she will recover from the “flux” or die. They, too, are infected with the fever for emigration to Europe and their journey (once she has recovered enough to travel and he has overcome a knee injury that left him behind the band he started out with) is the stuff of survivalist nightmares. A landslide that falls into a lake that releases toxic gas that kills the whole population of Margaret’s town, rustlers who kidnap and enslave Franklin, a religious sect whose hospitality requires the destruction of everything metal, a child who has been abandoned—all these befall our hero and heroine who very slowly realize the dangers that they have faced have bonded them to one another more than any “better life” in a faraway land ever could. The author has referred to this as a “fairy tale” and, if you take a close look at what we call fairy tales, he might be right. But, at any rate, it is a compelling read and a touching love story that draws you in and won’t let go until the very last page.

      After these two intense reads, I searched through my selection of “advance copies” for something that promised a little more “comfort.” And I found one of my favorite “light-read” authors, Dorothea Benton Frank, whose book The Land of the Mango Sunsets (24.95) was just the ticket! It’s about Miriam Elizabeth Swanson, a middle aged woman, divorced by her husband, estranged from her two sons and determined to stay in New York, far away from her domineering mother. She lives in a town house which also houses two tenants on the upper floors—one occupied by her closest friend, Kevin, a gay fashion designer, and the other recently rented by a young girl who says nothing about her past. She is struggling to maintain her place in the social class of the wealthy volunteers who support the non-profit art world—a place all but closed to single divorcees. Her mother invites her home for a visit during the worst of the New York winter and she gives in—as much for the South Carolina weather as for her discomfort with her social situation. She finds her mother living in their seaside home on Sullivans Island and she has torn up her beautiful flower beds to accommodate a goat and three chickens. She has a charming but much younger boyfriend (?) and Miriam catches the two of them smoking pot! She returns to New York and seeks Kevin’s solace. The gradual transformation of this opinionated matron to a loving and accepting mother (and daughter) is a feel-good of the highest order!

    That author was such a delight, I turned to another of my favorites, Maeve Binchy, whose Whitethorn Woods (25.95) was on the N.Y. Times Bestseller list (and so 20% off). Maeve’s novel is about the people connected to the town of Rossmore, Ireland, where a new highway threatens to bypass the town and destroy their woods that include a shrine to St. Ann. Each chapter is about a different person with a whole host of family situations that need sorting out. As the next character is introduced, you notice there might be a way one life might have a beneficial impact on another. You also notice there are a lot of people on both sides of the crisis that threatens their pious practices at the shrine—many people credit their health and their love life to the intercession of the saint. The biggest skeptic is the parish priest who is wise enough not to express his opinion one way or another. All told, you feel you have had a good look at the town with one close-up after another at their simple but believing citizens. Definitely a “feel-good” experience!