Other times if felt so clear, this absence, so intimately close it made her heart lurch.Ībdullah’s life takes a different course.

Like a message sent across shadowy byways and vast distances, a weak signal on a radio dial, remote, warbled. …that for as long as she could remember there was in her life the absence of something, or someone, fundamental to her own existence. Unaware of either her previous life or the existence of her brother, she nevertheless feels there is something missing: In the following decades we hear how Pari blossoms, first in Kabul and then later in Paris, achieving academic success and personal happiness. But his action means the three-year-old is separated from her adoring brother, Abdullah. He believes she will enjoy a far better future than he can provide in their remote village. Out of the despair of poverty, Saboor has agreed to hand over his daughter, Pari, to a wealthy but childless couple in Kabul. Shortly after Saboor ends his story, it becomes clear that he is about to make his own sacrifice. It’s a fable about the sacrifices made by parents in the furtherance of a greater reward. As they cross the Afghan desert en route for Kabul, a father relates a folk tale to his small daughter and her older brother. Storytelling is in fact how Hosseini opens his novel. Doing so would be to diminish Hosseni’s achievement as a storyteller par excellence. But it would be a mistake to approach And the Mountains Echoed as if it were simply a formulaic novel or, as one reviewer described it, “an airport novel”. Having focused on fathers and sons in The Kite Runner and on mothers and daughters in A Thousand Splendid Suns, for his third novel Hosseini turns his attention to sibling relationships. There is a thematic similarity too, with an exploration of the dynamics of familial relationships.

The key features of those earlier successes are certainly evident in And the Mountains Echoed: siblings separated by hardship and tragedy, nostalgia for the Afghanistan of former years and the clash of western and eastern civilisations, all rendered within an emotionally charged atmosphere. Could he emulate the success of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, both of which topped the book charts for many weeks and went on to sell more than 38 million copies worldwide? Expectations ran high in the run-up to the publication of Khaled Hosseini’s latest novel And the Mountains Echoed.

Kite runner and the mountains echoed