A Doctor who penned, “And the Mountains Echoed”.

In the year 2007, when the author visited a village in Afghanistan with the UN Refugee Agency, he heard many stories from several villagers about the death of young & impoverished children during the winters, which made him consider this as a plot for his 3rd book about how we love, how we take care of one another, and how the choices we make resonate through generations.

This is his first book not dealing directly with the Taliban, to keep the storyline fresh.

“I hope a day will come when we write about Afghanistan, where we can speak about Afghanistan in a context outside of the wars and the struggles of the last 30 years. In some way, I think this book is an attempt to do that.”

Khaled Hosseini

The plot of this novel of Khaled Hosseini, an Afghan-American novelist, physician, activist, humanitarian, and UNHCR goodwill ambassador open in 1952.

A story that starts with the struggle of a farmer to save his little daughter “Pari” and provide her with a better life away from Afghanistan ends with the reunion of Abdullah and Pari in California after more than 50 years apart.

All the nine-chapter of this novel is told from a different character’s perspective, and each narrative provides interconnection with the others. This novel is also a beautiful example of a “fragmented and fluid” form of writing.

The separation of the two siblings, Abdullah and Pari and how they subsequently become victims of the passage of time, is the heart of this book. Khaled Hosseini considers pain, love, and familial love to be the primary themes of “And the Mountains Echoed”.

This is the third novel of Khaled Hosseini Published in 2013 by Riverhead Books. Hosseini stated his intentions to make the characters more complex and morally ambiguous. Continuing the familial theme established in his previous novels, “The Kite Runner” and “A Thousand Splendid Suns”.

“I think at the core, all three of my books have been love stories — and they haven’t been traditional love stories in the sense that a romantic love story between a man and a woman, you know, they’ve been stories of love between characters where you would not expect love to be found. So it is always these intense relationships that form under unexpected circumstances”

Khaled Hosseini