Miriam 
She is the main character of the story. She was born illegitimately to a wealthy man of Herat and one of his housekeepers. She tries to force her father to acknowledge her as his daughter, but it leads to the heartache of her mother’s suicide and her own arranged marriage to Rasheed. She lives with him many years as an abused wife until Laila becomes his second wife. They establish a fast friendship and Mariam eventually kills Rasheed as he is choking Laila to death. She is executed by the Taliban for her crime.

• Miriam 
She is the main character of the story. She was born illegitimately to a wealthy man of Herat and one of his housekeepers. She tries to force her father to acknowledge her as his daughter, but it leads to the heartache of her mother’s suicide and her own arranged marriage to Rasheed. She lives with him many years as an abused wife until Laila becomes his second wife. They establish a fast friendship and Mariam eventually kills Rasheed as he is choking Laila to death. She is executed by the Taliban for her crime.

• Laila 
She is a beautiful young girl with golden hair who is raised by a modern set of parents to be an educated woman in an Islamic world. Because her parents are killed by a Mujahideen rocket, and she is six weeks pregnant to Tariq whom she believes is dead, she married Rasheed. Like Mariam, she becomes part of a home where she is abused and where she carries on a lie that her daughter is Rasheed’s. Eventually, after Tariq surfaces and Rasheed finds out that she allowed him in their home, she is nearly choked to death by her husband. Only Mariam’s intervention saves her life. She is then forced to leave Afghanistan with her children in order to protect her son and daughter. Mariam accepts her fate and is left behind.

• Tariq 
He is the neighbor boy that Laila has always loved. He lost his leg when he stepped on a land mine quite early in his life, but is one of the toughest kids in his neighborhood. He always protected her from anyone who bullies her. He leaves Afghanistan with his parents when it becomes impossible to stay in a crumbling society. He promise to find Laila when he can. He ends up in a refugee camp where his father dies. He is determined to get his mother out of the camp and accepts a job delivering a leather coat to another city. Unfortunately, the coat is lined with hashish and he is caught by Pakistani police. He is sentenced to seven years in prison, which is really a generous sentence for the times and then is released. His mother has died in the interim and so he heads home to Kabul. There he finds Laila, and with his presence, sets up the death of Rasheed. He later escapes from Kabul with Laila and returns to Murree, Pakistan, to wed her and come to know his real daughter, Aziza. In the end, he agrees to go back to Kabul when the Taliban is driven out to help rebuild the city they love.

Rasheed 
He is villain of the story, a cruel, abusive man who was dead drunk when his only son fell into a lake and drowned. He had already lost his wife in childbirth and has become more than bitter. He is almost psychotic. He beats and verbally abuses both his wives whom he married to create a son to replace the one he lost. Later, his abusive behavior leads to his murder, when one wife kills him to save the other.

• Rasheed 
He is villain of the story, a cruel, abusive man who was dead drunk when his only son fell into a lake and drowned. He had already lost his wife in childbirth and has become more than bitter. He is almost psychotic. He beats and verbally abuses both his wives whom he married to create a son to replace the one he lost. Later, his abusive behavior leads to his murder, when one wife kills him to save the other.

• Jalil Khan 
He is Mariam’s father who made the mistake of an affair with one his housecleaners to produce her. He is a loving father who visits her once a week at the hut in the village of Gul Daman where he has sent her and her mother to live. She is really an object of shame for him, but his love for her will not allow him to completely dismiss her. However, when she forces him to recognize her, he marries her off to Rasheed, a decision he comes later to regret very much. He comes to see her in Kabul to tell her that he is dying, but she refuses to see him. So, within days of his death, he leaves her oval box filled with a videotape, a letter of apology, and a huge amount of money from what he had left in material possessions. He sends it to Mullah Faizullah for safekeeping, just in case Mariam returns to find her father. However, he dies without ever hearing the knock at the door that would be Mariam.

Aziza
Daughter of Tariq and Laila but said to be daughter of Rasheed. Sent to an orphanage by Rasheed when food and money are scarce.

• Aziza
Daughter of Tariq and Laila but said to be daughter of Rasheed. Sent to an orphanage by Rasheed when food and money are scarce.

• Zalmai 
He is the son of Rasheed and Laila and looks and acts like his father, even though he is just a small child

• Mammy and Babi 
They are Laila’s parents

• Mullah Faizullah 
He is the tutor Mariam knew and loved. He came to the kolba to teach her the Koranic verses and prayers, but comes to admire her and believe she is a wonderful little girl who should be acknowledged by her father. He is devastated when her father marries her to Rasheed, but willingly saves the box that Jalil Khan leaves behind to save for the daughter he allowed to get away. He dies with the wish that his son guard the box for Mariam who will never see it.

• Abdul Sharif 
He is a doorman at the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul who is paid by Rasheed to pretend he had been in the hospital room where Tariq was brought and died. His story to Laila is filled with tenderness, sorrow, and supposedly Tariq’s last words. However, even though Laila readily believes it, it is all a lie, and only when Mariam recognizes him when she goes to the hotel to telephone her father, does the Laila learn that this is how Rasheed tricked her into marrying him.

The story covers three decades of anti-Soviet jihad, civil war and Taliban tyranny seen from the perspectives of two women. Mariam is the scorned illegitimate daughter of a wealthy businessman, forced at age fifteen into marrying Rasheed, who grows increasingly brutal when she fails to produce a child. Eighteen years later, Rasheed takes another wife, fourteen year-old Laila, a smart and spirited girl whose only other options, after her parents are killed by rocket fire, are prostitution or starvation. Mariam and Laila become allies in a battle with Rasheed, whose violent abuse is endorsed by custom and law. The author gives a forceful portrait of despotism where women are dependent on fathers, husbands and especially sons, the bearing of male children being their only path to an accepted social status. Each woman in the end is forced to accept a path that will never be completely happy for them: Mariam will have to sacrifice her life to save Laila after she murders their husband while Laila, even though marrying her childhood love, must find a way to keep the sacrifice Mariam has made from not becoming an act done in vain.

• The story covers three decades of anti-Soviet jihad, civil war and Taliban tyranny seen from the perspectives of two women. Mariam is the scorned illegitimate daughter of a wealthy businessman, forced at age fifteen into marrying Rasheed, who grows increasingly brutal when she fails to produce a child. Eighteen years later, Rasheed takes another wife, fourteen year-old Laila, a smart and spirited girl whose only other options, after her parents are killed by rocket fire, are prostitution or starvation. Mariam and Laila become allies in a battle with Rasheed, whose violent abuse is endorsed by custom and law. The author gives a forceful portrait of despotism where women are dependent on fathers, husbands and especially sons, the bearing of male children being their only path to an accepted social status. Each woman in the end is forced to accept a path that will never be completely happy for them: Mariam will have to sacrifice her life to save Laila after she murders their husband while Laila, even though marrying her childhood love, must find a way to keep the sacrifice Mariam has made from not becoming an act done in vain.

Man vs. Society

• Man vs. Society