Inspiring read.

Laila hated the whistling. “It wasn’t so much the whistling itself, Laila thought later, but the seconds before the start of it and impact. The brief and interminable time of feeling suspended. The not knowing. The waiting. Like a defendant about to hear the verdict.” Thus writes Khaled Hosseini in A Thousand Splendid Suns ( www.bloomsbury.com ).

The book is a story set in Afghanistan, at a time when the country was witness to bombing and whistling rocket firing. “Often it happened at dinner, when she and Babi were at the table. When it started, their heads snapped up. They listened to the whistling, forks in midair, unchewed food in their mouths… The whistling. Then the blast, blissfully elsewhere, followed by an expulsion of breath and the knowledge that they had been spared for now while somewhere else, amid cries and choking clouds of smoke, there was a scrambling, a barehanded frenzy of digging, of pulling from the debris, what remained of a sister, a brother, a grandchild.”

Heart-rending.

Every mystery cloaks an inner reason, each one gives its meaning only when we have allowed ourselves a new point of view, writes Richard Bach in Curious Lives ( www.jaicobooks.com ). There are no secrets; through observation, inquiry, through the kaleidoscope of intuition, we detect what has been facing us all along, he says. Something, that is, applicable to auditors too, you’d agree.