Before we meet the rockets and the rubble, before the Taliban and the terrible marriages, Khaled Hosseini takes us somewhere much smaller and much quieter: a kolba, a mud hut, on the outskirts of Herat. It sits in a clearing near a stream, at the foot of a hill, surrounded by willows and poplars, and it is the whole world of a girl named Mariam. She is fifteen years old when the novel's opening events unfold, but the story first reaches back to show us the years that shaped her — the childhood she spent in that single room, with a bitter mother and a father who visited only on Thursdays.

Mariam is a harami. The word, she is told early and often, means illegitimate, a child born outside of marriage. It is a word that carries shame the way a stone carries weight — invisibly at first, and then, with time, crushingly. Nana, her mother, made sure Mariam understood what it meant not with cruelty for cruelty's sake but with the blunt pragmatism of a woman who had been broken by the world and saw no reason to lie to her daughter about the shape of things. "Learn this now," Nana tells her in the way that only devastated people can speak to children they love, "and learn it well: like a compass needle points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman."

And yet — and this is what makes Mariam so quietly remarkable from the very first pages — she does not begin as a girl crushed by this knowledge. She begins as a girl who is curious, who laughs, who brings her rag doll into the stream and watches the water move. She is a child who still believes in the goodness of her father, who counts down the days to Thursday with a hope so fierce it almost looks like joy. The kolba is a life of poverty and isolation, but Mariam has not yet learned to see it as a prison.