'And the mountains echoed'

Author: Khaled Hosseini

Publisher: Riverhead Books / 2013

Pages: 466

Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul in 1965. Still a young boy, he migrated, together with his family, to America.

He studied biology at the Santa Clara university and later medicine at San Diego. He practised as a doctor from 1996 to 2004 but then, with the massive success of his first book, The Kite Runner, he devoted himself exclusively to writing.

Especially in his first three books, he expresses the soul of his own people at a time when it was passing through crucial phases in its history, first the Russian domination, then freedom followed by a civil war, which has delivered the country to the Taleban.

The Kite Runner (2003) tells us the unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father's servant. Set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed, it speaks about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption. It is also an exploration of the power of fathers over sons - their love, their sacrifices, their lies.

It is a sweeping story of family, love and friendship told against the devastating backdrop of the history of Afghanistan over the last 30 years.

The second book is A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007).

Mariam, an illegitimate teenager from Herat, is forced to marry a shoemaker from Kabul after a family tragedy.

Laila, born a generation later, lives a relatively privileged life, but her life intersects with Mariam's when a similar tragedy forces her to accept a marriage proposal from Mariam's husband.

Hosseini has said that he regards the novel as a "mother-daughter" story in contrast to The Kite-Runner, which he considers a "father-son" story.

The novel continues some of the themes used in his previous work, such as familial dynamics, but instead focuses primarily on female characters and their roles in contemporary Afghan society.

Hosseini wrote: "In the spring of 2003, I went to Kabul, and I recall seeing these burqa-clad women sitting at street corners, begging for change, with four, five or six children. I remember watching them walking in pairs up the street, trailed by their children in ragged clothes, and wondering how life had brought them to that point... I spoke to many of these women in Kabul. Their life stories were truly heartbreaking. Though no one woman that I met in Kabul inspired either Laila or Mariam, their voices, faces and their incredible stories of survival were always with me."

Finally, the book I am reviewing today: And the Mountains Echoed (2013).

This book deviates from Hosseini's first two works because he chooses to avoid focusing on any one character.

As in The Kite Runner there are siblings separated by hardship and tragedy.

There is nostalgia for old Afghanistan, its clashes with western freedoms, shattered by modern wars.

It is a collection of tales of loss, betrayal and redemption.

At the beginning a father is enticed by a div, or demon, to a terrible pact - he can gift his favourite child a better life by giving the child away, never to see her again.

This is what Saboor, the poor Afghan father, does to his three-year old daughter, Pari, who is given to the wife of a wealthy man, despite the unusually powerful bond to her brother, Abdullah.

The story wanders off and introduces other characters - the first stepmother, Parwana, has a sibling sorrow of her own; the uncle, Nabi, who makes the deal that separates the children. Pari's new stepmother, Nila Wahdati, callously removes Pari to France for a new life.

Two expats, Timur and Idris, return to reclaim a house in Kabul, near the one to which Pari was first stolen away.

Idris, the sensitive doctor, is embarrassed by their Americanised attitudes and the power that money gives them. But at the end the culturally sophisticated Idris turns out to be ineffectual while the crass and ethically dodgy Timur is the one who gets things done and makes a difference.

The end is not quite the expected coming together but rather a trigger for memory. At the end Hosseini has communicated to the millions of readers a supple, conflicted and complex picture of his country.

I will always remember the story of the young man brought up in comfort and affluence whose sporadic and coincidental contact with a poor boy of his age brings him to understand he and his family are living on the ruins of that poor boy's family and that his father's supposed farm down south is a cocaine facility.