With A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini, author of the best-selling The Kite Runner, hit the sweet spot again. In her review for The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani spelled out the yin and yang of the Afghan-American author’s neatly matched narratives. “Whereas The Kite Runner focused on fathers and sons, and friendships between men,” she wrote, “[A Thousand Splendid Suns] focuses on mothers and daughters, and friendships between women. Whereas Kite Runner got off to a gripping start and stumbled into contrivance and sentimentality in its second half, Splendid Suns starts off programmatically and gains speed and emotional power as it slowly unfurls.” The operatic adaptation of the later novel is the work of Stephen Kitsakos (libretto) and Sheila Silver (music). The director is Roya Sadat, an Afghan filmmaker whose international honors include the 2021 Kim Dae-hun Nobel Peace Film Award and the 2018 International Women of Courage Award presented by the United States Department of State. We’re counting on Sadat to help give the American cast a stamp of authenticity. Karin Mashegain and Maureen McKay star as Mariam and Laila, first rivals but later allies against the brutish shoemaker Rasheed (John Moore), who is husband to both. —Matthew Gurewitsch