RUNNING AWAY WITH IT

Penguin's Loi Zhi Wei is back from her first visit to India. While she's shying away from narrating her saree experience, she's filling me in with the literary news. For that, as always, I'm grateful.

So here it is.

Khaled Hosseini's 'The Kite Runner' has been voted Reading Group Book of the Year for the second year running!

The Penguin Orange Broadband Reader's Group Prize 2007 is voted for by reading groups across Britain and 'The Kite Runner' makes it to the record books by winning the award two years in a row.

More power to the readers who are making the call - that's the way it should be.

What's even better, is Hosseini's wonderful response:
"It is a tremendous honor to me that The Kite Runner has again been awarded the Penguin Orange Broadband Readers' Group Prize. I am so very proud and moved that four years after its publication, The Kite Runner continues to resonate with reading groups. So many distinguished novels are written every year, so many books to celebrate, which makes this prize that much more meaningful to me. I want express my appreciation to reading groups for embracing this novel and for being so instrumental in generating the word of mouth that has been this book's lifeblood. I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Tashakor!"

Arzu Tahsin, the book's editor spells out more reasons why the book continues to travel:
"Fantastic story-telling is alive and well and the Penguin Orange Broadband Readers' Group Prize prize proves the amazing power of word-of-mouth. The Kite Runner is one of those books you would whole-heartedly recommend and give to friends and the enduring memory of the story means that you will keep on recommending it."

No surprise that in addition to its phenomenal success, the book continues to sell over 4,000 copies a week.

This year it beat 'We Need to Talk About Kevin', 'Saturday', 'Small Island', 'Suite Francaise' and 'The Time Traveller's Wife'.

Will it get third time lucky? I wouldn't be surprised.

DOES THE SUN SHINE?

Pages: 367
Price: US$18
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Year: May 2007

Parallel lives. One in a kolba, a rambling little shack in the fictional Afghan village of Gul Daman, another in capital Kabul. Love, friendship, betrayal and boys. Khaled Hosseini told us that tale in The Kite Runner.

This time he returns to his familiar setting, albeit with very different characters. It is a study of the human condition, of resilience, of love when all is lost and it is told through Mariam and Laila. Two women from two entirely different worlds. Mariam is the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy cinema owner in Herat. It's a fact her mother never lets her forget. She is told the day she walks out of the kolba, her heart-broken mother will be dead. Rules are meant to be broken, Mariam does it in search of perfect paternal love. When she gets a disappointing taste of the real world, her mother is dead and life as she has known it ends for Mariam. She barely has time to come to grips with what's happening around her. Before she knows it, her father's family has got rid of her by hurriedly marrying her off to the much older and widowed Rasheed and packed her off to Kabul.

Mariam sees her world fall apart several times. The day she realises, her father wouldn't own her, the day she loses her mother, the day she becomes pregnant and loses her child. The cycle of loss keeps repeating itself when she knows she can never be a mother again. By the time the war is upon them, Rasheed has lost all interest in her and Mariam's spirit has been fully crushed. Till Laila arrives.

Unlike Mariam, Laila is a legitimate child. Babi, her father has insisted on giving her an education and she hasn't disappointed:
I know you're still young, but I want you to understand and learn this now, he said. Marriage can wait, education cannot. You're a very, very bright girl. Truly, you are. You can be anything you want, Laila. I know this about you. And I also know that when this war is over, Afghanistan is going to need you as much as its men, maybe even more. Because a society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated, Laila. No chance.

So Babi believed before the war transformed the entire landscape. Laila lost her brothers, her mother lost her sanity and when they eventually decided to pack their bags and leave for Pakistan where she hopes to reunite with the love of her life - Tariq, it's all a little too late. A bomb shatters their house, her parents are killed instantly and a badly injured Laila is pulled out of the rubble of her home by Rasheed.

With that, the various strings that bind this novel so adeptly come together. I like the way Hosseini keeps you guessing, the way he gets into the skin of his characters to capture every little nuance. One of the lines that's stayed in my head is the one which shows Laila and Mariam accepting their fate and bringing themselves to terms with being Rasheed's wives.

An unguarded unknowing look. And in this fleeting, wordless exchange with Mariam, Laila knew that they were not enemies any longer.

With that the novel takes on a whole new spin. Once the enmity is forgotten, new truths are discovered. On the one hand, Hosseini captures their lives in the house and in another broad sweep you get glimpses of an Afghanistan rapidly falling apart.

Spanning from the 1970s to 2003, A Thousand Splendid Suns, is a window to Afghanistan starting with the good years, the Soviet occupation, to the rise of the Taliban and eventually into its conversion into a war zone. It's a tough job and for that one couldn't have asked for a better narrator than Hosseini.

To some the novel may sound overly sentimental, but when a war transforms a human landscape, there are bound to be tears. Hosseini knows that.