idris and timur and the mountains echoed

Yet each story makes the themes its own through its characters, be they a flamboyant actress who finds her serious child a burden, a national poet who feels let down by her mathematically inclined child, a self-reliant man who finds himself forced to rely on the goodness of his handsome domestic help, or a severely disfigured girl who is dependent on what can be the fickle kindness of strangers. Spanning 60 years, from the 1950s to the 2000s, all the stories explore similar issues: rural versus urban life, disfigurement and handicaps, dependence and abandonment, disease and death, and sibling as well as parental rivalries and loyalties. Subsequent chapters offer clues to their fates, culminating in the book’s heart-wrenching denouement. This is followed by a quiet but completely devastating chapter, “Fall 1952,” about a pair of star-crossed siblings. It sets in motion the novel’s major themes: hard choices, economic realities and, above all, personal accountability. The book begins with a beautifully rendered fable, told by an unknown narrator, concerning a div, or monster, and child sacrifice.

They are linked by shared characters and themes, which ricochet and reverberate to form the wondrous echo chamber of the whole.

It might be called a novel told in stories each of the exquisitely crafted nine chapters could easily stand as a separate short story. Now, And the Mountains Echoed (2013, Riverhead Books), Hosseini’s finest and most ambitious novel, proves once and for all that the Afghan-American doctor is easily one of the most masterful storytellers of our day. Then, defying the proverbial “sophomore slump,” Hosseini’s second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007), which follows two women in Afghanistan over several tumultuous decades, earned critical and commercial success as well. It certainly didn’t hurt that it was a beautifully told, compulsive read about tests of friendship between a rich boy and a poor one. Many attributed its success to increasing American curiosity about Afghanistan.

The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini‘s 2003 debut novel, became an unexpected best seller and a feature film.

Idris and timur and the mountains echoed