This lack of love and belonging is a constant theme throughout Mariam’s life, but she has a remarkable ability to endure and persevere through suffering-often with the help of the Koran verses that she spent her childhood memorizing. After feeling unwanted by and unimportant to Jalil, she is also shunned by her husband when she is unable to bear him a child. Throughout her life, Mariam is plagued by the shame of being a harami, or bastard (illegitimate child)-in addition to the greater shame of believing she contributed to her mother’s suicide. She grows up in a small hut several kilometers outside the city with her mother, Nana, before being married off at the age of fifteen to Rasheed and moving to Kabul. One of the novel’s protagonists, Mariam is the illegitimate daughter of one of the most successful businessmen in the city of Herat, Jalil.
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