The scope is also similarly broad in addition to Afghanistan, Hosseini dispatches his characters to Northern California, Paris and the Greek island of Tinos. In less adept hands these subplots might have been distracting but it is to the author’s credit that he maintains narrative momentum in each chapter, and that his panoramic method of storytelling makes the book feel urgent, and whole, demonstrating the extent to which disparate lives can be deeply connected.Īnd the Mountains Echoed is as moving and thoughtful as Hosseini’s two previous novels, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. Hosseini also examines, in great detail, the lives of more peripheral characters: a Greek plastic surgeon who treats Afghanistan’s wounded a well-meaning Afghan expatriate who returns to his homeland and makes promises he will never keep and a young boy who discovers his father’s corruption at a terrible price to himself. The siblings’ separation is at the heart of the novel’s intricate tapestry, linking not just Pari and Abdullah but also the book’s other characters: the children’s stepmother, Parwana, who hides a terrible secret their Uncle Nabi, haunted at the end of his life by his role in Pari’s adoption Pari’s new mother, a poet who is as talented as she is unhappy. And while Afghanistan’s modern history provides some of the novel’s backdrop, Hosseini focuses primarily on the devilish decisions his characters are forced to make and their far-reaching consequences. Their father, who barely makes ends meet and who has already lost one child to an early death, strikes this Faustian bargain so that “the finger is cut, to save the hand.” But it is a wound that never closes, dogging brother and sister through all the decades that follow. The children listening to the story do not realize that it foreshadows their own immediate fate, and a few days later Pari, the younger sister, is handed over to a wealthy, childless couple in Kabul, where she will eventually forget her village life and her adoring brother Abdullah. The rub is that if the father chooses the second option, he will never see his son again. The demon tests the father’s love by offering him a choice: to take his son back to their impoverished village and the life of hardship that is sure to follow, or to leave the boy in his care. Instead, the boy is furnished with “the finest food and clothes, with friendship and affection.” He is tutored, wants for nothing and will one day be given the option to leave.

He describes one particularly heartbroken man who eventually goes after the demon and discovers that his son has not met an unhappy end after all. At the beginning of Khaled Hosseini’s third novel, And the Mountains Echoed, it is 1952 and an Afghan laborer is telling his son and daughter a bedtime story about a demon who steals children.

And the mountains echoed author