A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini (HC, 2007, $3)
Khaled Hosseini, who wrote The Kite Runner, writes here of two Afghan generations brought together by wars- first the Soviet invasion, then the take-over by the Taliban, and finally the post-9/11 war, "where personal lives - the struggle to survive, raise a family, find happiness- are inextricable from the history playing out around them."
Thinking about all this makes my personal problems seem tiny, tiny, tiny in comparison. Look for this book in the fiction section.
