3. Where does the title of your new book come from?

It comes from a poem about Kabul by Saib-e-Tabrizi, a seventeenth-century Persian poet, who wrote it after a visit to the city left him deeply impressed. I was searching for English translations of poems about Kabul, for use in a scene where a character bemoans leaving his beloved city, when I found this particular verse. I realized that I had found not only the right line for the scene, but also an evocative title in the phrase "a thousand splendid suns," which appears in the next-to-last stanza. The poem was translated from Farsi by Dr. Josephine Davis.