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Khaled Hosseini has lived in America for nearly 30 years, but – as readers of his bestselling The Kite Runner know – he hasn’t forgotten his native Afghanistan. The country is the most effective character in this new novel. It’s the beautiful inspiration for the 17th-century poem from which the title is taken. It’s also a land of fruit trees, herb shops, wild flowers, “museums and soccer and rockets”, before the disastrous last three decades when it becomes a setting for murderous rivalries, ruined homes, refugee camps, polluted rivers, swaggering killers, funeral processions and “rock-piled graves”.

The book is a tale of two women, Mariam and Laila. Their lives begin separately but they are brought together by cruelty, violence, abuse and shame, united in common cause against a shared husband, linked in hard-won respect and love. Mariam is born illegitimate in a tiny rural home and forced to marry Rasheed, a middle aged shoemaker with yellow-brown nails “like the inside of a rotting apple” and a belief in men’s right to discipline their wives with burkas, beatings and occasional strangulation. Her numerous miscarriages only goad him towards greater hatred.

Laila is younger and lives in town. She falls in love with her childhood friend Tariq and bears his child, concealing this from Rasheed, who marries her when a rocket blows up her family just as they are on the point of escaping to safety. Later, she gives Rasheed the son he’s always wanted. Many of the book’s chapters switch between the two women’s view-points, but there is something willed in this structural manoeuvre. Mariam’s mother hangs herself and Laila’s mother retreats into bedridden depression, but their brief and opaque stories are more convincing than their daughters’ extensive narratives.

One problem is that historical and political concerns are too observably wheeled into place. Chapters begin “Three years passed” or “Two and a half years later”. Two successive paragraphs list half a dozen mujaheddin factions with brief portraits of their commanders, as if lifted from a newspaper article. Sociological details are awkwardly presented as fragments of stilted conversation: “Almost two-thirds of the students at Kabul University were women now, Babi said.” A convenient taxi driver discusses Afghan history in a strained simile: “We’re like those walls up there. Battered . .. but still standing.” You can almost see pencil lines being drawn in the margin by earnest book-group readers.

The raw intensity of the facts asks for our respect. Countless real people suffered and died like this and the book tries to show us how it might have been for a handful of them, but the writing isn’t up to what Conrad called the task of making us see. Hosseini talks of “the flip side of being spared” a rocket attack, as if war were something like a jukebox. He describes “the tendrils of her [Laila’s] mind” and within less than a page talks of “her mind. . . hurtling like a speeding missile”.

Wordiness keeps coming between the writer and his object. Hosseini favours the formula of triple-piled clichés. Mariam feels “uprooted, displaced, like an intruder”. Laila tries “to conjure up, to dust off, to resuscitate once again” her erotic memories of Tariq. Mariam looks into Rasheed’s eyes and asks herself 10 rhetorical questions in a row. Where the climaxes should come – as with an execution in a football stadium – the writing can fail to carry conviction.

A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS by Khaled Hosseini

Bloomsbury £16.99 pp384

Buy the book here for the offer price of £15.29 (inc p&p)

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