WHEN Khaled Hosseini's heart-rending debut novel, The Kite Runner, was published in 2003 it was met with glowing reviews across the world, and so it's with great relief that his long-awaited followup, A Thousand Splendid Suns, looks set to do exactly same.

Centering on the lives and loves of two remarkably stron women, this book can hardly fail to move even the most embittered of hearts.

Set in the achingly beautiful but wartorn landscapes of Afghanistan, Mariam is just 15 when her rich father Jahil banishes her to Kabul and into a marriage with bitter Rasheed, three decades her senior.

She is soon resigned to an existence as little more than his personal slave, forced to wear a burqua and suffer his violent beatings.

Twenty-odd years later, young Laila's parents are killed by a rocket on the same street where Mariam and Rasheed live.

Broken, alone and, she soon realises, pregnant, Laila is devastated when she is informed that her childhood sweetheart Tariq has also been killed, and sees no other option but to accept Rasheed's manipulative offer to become his second wife - and pass off her unborn child as his own. Although initially hostile towards Laila, Mariam grows to love and rely upon her, and the two women soon form an affinity that even the infamous brutality of the Taliban could never hope to break.