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BY THE END OF KHALED Hosseini’s new novel the residents of Kabul are picking themselves up again after the defeat of the Taleban. Unlike Hosseini’s best-selling debut The Kite Runner, which gradually turned into a novel about exile, A Thousand Splendid Suns is set almost exclusively in Afghanistan; it tells the story of two women who are unable to get out of the country when it is torn apart by the Russian invasion and civil war.

Mariam and Laila are trapped in Kabul by a succession of conflicts and the brutal patriarchy that predates them. The novel offers extraordinarily harrowing insights into the lives of Afghan women over the past three decades, suggesting that the men and boys who left the country – Hosseini’s focus in The Kite Runner– were the lucky ones, even if they found it difficult to adjust to the loss of status and material possessions.

Mariam’s problems begin long before the Soviet invasion, when her wealthy father marries her off to Rasheed, an ignorant and violent man who lives in a poor area of Kabul. Rasheed does not mind that Mariam is illegitimate; middle-aged himself, he is delighted to have a young bride and the chance of a son to replace a child who died through his negligence.

The early pages of the novel convey what was (and still is in some parts of the country) a commonplace horror for Afghan girls, who have traditionally been little more than a unit of exchange between men. When Mariam fails to provide him with a son, Rasheed starts treating her as a slave, beating her savagely at the slightest excuse. It falls to a neighbour, a university lecturer who has lost his job, to tell his teenage daughter Laila that the Russian invasion has at least initiated a new and better regime for the next generation of Afghan women.

To Laila, Mariam is virtually invisible, a figure in a burka who never ventures outside without her coarse and vulgar husband. Then the shelling begins, Laila’s elder brothers become shaheed – martyrs in the fight to liberate their country – and she finds herself alone in a war-torn city without a male protector. Deafened by a bomb blast and terrified that she is pregnant by her boyfriend Tariq, who has already left Afghanistan, Laila’s fate starts to resemble that of countless Afghan women down the ages.

It is a road to humiliation and servitude, and it is only the friendship she forms with Mariam, against all expectation, that saves her from falling into total despair. The two women share similar experiences as victims of male lust, contempt and violence, and when Laila’s daughter is born she becomes both the focus of their affection and their hope for a new generation.

Where The Kite Runner was constructed on two levels, the realistic and the symbolic, Hosseini’s second novel is unflinchingly anchored in the real world. The terrible things that happen to Mariam and Laila are the consequence of confining women to a domestic milieu in which men wield absolute power, aided and abetted by religious fanatics.

Their situation, which seems bad enough when they first meet, is indescribably worse once the Taleban ride into Kabul with their proclamations banning women from work, education and public places. Hosseini demonstrates brilliantly the way in which men such as Rasheed collude with and even welcome a regime that confirms the power of fathers, husbands and brothers. Growing a beard is not much of an imposition for him, and he finds himself belonging to an elite solely on the grounds of gender.

Since they were driven out of Afghanistan, there has been a tendency in the West to forget the worst excesses of the Taleban, whose simple-mind-ed puritanism is easy to mock. But their regime was no laughing matter, as Hosseini’s novel reminds us, and their return would be an unmitigated disaster for that country and its women. This is popular fiction of the most superior kind, and I suspect that it will have an even greater impact on many readers than The Kite Runner.

Despite its stunning success, that novel was in some ways an experiment, in which it was possible to sense Hosseini feeling his way as a writer; there were longeurs, in which the different parts of the narrative did not fit easily together, and the plot sometimes seemed more important than the characters.

In A Thousand Brilliant Suns, Hosseini is not just more assured, although this feels like the work of a much more accomplished writer. If he cut his teeth by writing about his countrymen, it is the plight of Afghanistan’s women that has brought him to realise his full powers as a novelist.

A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS by Khaled Hosseini

Bloomsbury, £16.99; 389pp

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

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