Wot I'm reading: Khaled Hosseini: A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS

Novels do not get any better than this. If, like me, you've missed out on it, make good your oversight now. I'd put it up there with Zafon's Shadow of the Wind as one of the best novels of the new century - certain (they both are) to become an all-time classic.

Hosseini's prose is unpretentious, his narrative style simple and straightforward. He tells a terrible story: the interweaving of the lives of two Afghani women from the ending of the Soviet invasion to the beginning of the 'coalition' one after 9/11, with the rule of the Mujahideen and the Taliban sandwiched inbetween.

Mariam, the older of the two women, the bastard daughter of a provincial cinema-owner, has a loveless childhood, resented by her mother, an embarrassment to her father who marries her off at 15 to Rasheed, a Kabul shoemaker three times her age. After a series of miscarriages her husband turns against her.

A few years later, abused with escalating brutality, Mariam befriends Laila, a teenage Juliet who has lost her Romeo. I wouldn't want to spoil the book for you by giving away any more of its intricate plot, but through many trials and tribulations in their own lives and the life of Afghanistan the women slowly bond. Mariam feels "the first true connection in her life of false, failed connections." Then an unexpected event turns their lives upside down.

This is one of the saddest books I've ever read but also one of the most riveting. Writing from exile in the US, Hosseini vividly recreates his native land and the horrors it has endured through successive regime changes. The oppression of women, perennially relegated to 'second-class citizens' in so much of the Muslim world, reached a new peak under the savage rule of the Taliban. Rasheed is up there with Charles Dickens's Bill Sikes as one of literature's vilest villains. In the West we deplore the handful of Bill Sikeses that our culture still produces. A regime like the Taliban actively encourages men like Rasheed to subjugate and even brutalize their womenfolk.

When our soldiers are borne in coffins through the streets of Wootton Bassett, we need to think of women like Mariam and Laila and what their lives, the lives of thousands, millions, of women, are like under the rule of the Taliban (and fanatical Fundamentalists in many other countries). Our gallant lads are fighting - are dying - to give these women and their children a future free from tyranny. The 'War Against Terror' is also a fight for women to be allowed to live as something more than medieval chattels.