Bookseller of Kabul

For me, one of the most interesting things about Bookseller is the character of Sultan. He's a very complicated person: though you think of him as liberal in that he continues printing and selling books under the Taliban rule, his family life is still very conservative. He's an odd mixture of modern ideas and traditional muslim values, and that makes his character much more rounded and his story more interesting. One of the things I disliked about A Thousand Splendid Suns was that, at times, the antagonists could seem two dimensional; they were more or less portrayed as evil oppressors and nothing more. The fact that Sultan's first wife resents him, but at the same time loves him, makes me as a reader much more emotionally invested in their interactions, and the different sides of Sultan's beliefs makes him as a character much more thought-provoking. His character really challenges the assumption that in the Middle East there exists only the radical extremists and the oppressed liberals; he is an intriguing mixture of both.