In 2003, the doctor visits Kabul with his cousin, a sexy used-car salesman.

One of my favorite chapters revolves around a doctor who, like Hosseini, is born in Afghanistan and educated in California. But Hosseini carefully divvies up details about the circumstances preceding and following Abdullah and Pari’s fateful afternoon, giving the book a satisfying sense of momentum and consequence.

In less skillful hands, this structure might seem more like a compilation of short stories than a novel.

Chapter 7 happens in 2009, when the son of a former mujahideen realizes that his father’s mansion is his mother’s prison.īook cover image released by Riverhead Books. Chapter 3, for example, takes place in 1949, when Abdullah’s plain stepmother falls in love with the same man as does her gorgeous twin sister. Like Jennifer Egan’s “ A Visit From the Goon Squad,” Hosseini’s novel is built as a series of tales, each told in a different style from a different point of view. “Wh en you have lived as long as I have,” one character says, “you find that cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same color.” Again and again, his characters face a test of love: Will they sacrifice their dearest for a better life, or will they remain loyal at the cost of their own happiness? In every case, someone’s getting damaged. Later, Abdullah will think back on that terrible afternoon and remember a line from one of his father’s bedtime stories: “A finger had to be cut, to save the hand.”įingers are sliced off in almost every chapter of Hosseini’s novel. Now his father has walked Abdullah and Pari across miles of desert, from their tiny village to the great city of Kabul, in hopes that one brutal act - a bargain with two rich devils - will save their family from the next ruthless winter. The previous winter, the cold seeped into his family’s shack and froze his 2-week-old stepbrother to death. Abdullah is the son of a broke day laborer his mother died giving birth to his sister, Pari. The killer scene is set in Kabul in 1952, in a home so heavy with fruit trees and privilege that when 10-year-old Abdullah crosses its threshold, he feels as if he has entered a palace. I’m not an easy touch when it comes to novels, but Hosseini’s new book, “ And the Mountains Echoed,” had tears dropping from my eyes by. In his case, the secret ingredient might be intense emotion. Hosseini’s first two novels, “ The Kite Runner” (2003) and “ A Thousand Splendid Suns” (2007), spent a combined total of 171 weeks on the bestseller list. Or perhaps it just means that some writers, like Khaled Hosseini, know how to whisk rough moral fiber into something exquisite. It suggests that readers crave more than simplistic escape. So it always renews my faith when a popular novelist shows a decided preference for moral complexity. In most cases, ambiguity is stripped away to appeal to the greatest number and lowest common denominator.

Hosseini and the mountains echoed