As you emerge, moist-eyed, from this riveting story of male brutality and female endurance, you may find yourself feeling that you've leapfrogged a massive cultural gap, landing in a warm mushy pile of empathy with two Afghan women whose circumstances could not be more different from yours. Sadly, this feeling is a delusion. You haven't crossed an enormous gap; you've read a very well-crafted novel that makes Afghan culture seem peculiarly like ours.

Khaled Hosseini is largely imagining a culture he lived in for eight of his first 11 years, and then revisited in 2003. Telling his story from the viewpoint of two women--one a barely educated provincial, one a middle-class Kabul girl, who end up as co-wives of the same brute--Hosseini offers descriptions of Afghan housecleaning, food preparation, and baby care that belie his sex and show his skill as a storyteller. His tale is leavened with Dari words, but it is an American's account, and A Thousand Splendid Suns reinforces a message Westerners want to believe: Afghan society is basically like ours, but for the flaw of gender inequality. And Afghans reason as we do, they just start with some bad ideas about women's place.