And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini: book review

And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini (2013) is the author’s third book after his best-sellers The Kite Runner (2003) and A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007). This novel is partially set in Afghanistan, the author’s birth country, from 1949 to 2010.

In 1952, Abdullah is ten years old and he is the protector and carer of his three-year-old sister Pari since their mother died. The brother and sister are inseparable: ‘It was a mystery. I have never seen such affinity between two beings,’ says one of the nine narrators of their story.

From a rural area, their poverty-stricken father Saboor takes Pari to the capital Kabul to sell her to a childless couple. Abdullah is determined not to be parted from his sister. But they are parted and lead very different lives in very different countries.

Finally, in California, more than 50 years later, they reunite in a poignant last chapter.

This is a story about love – of family. It is also about memory – and how distance, time, and age distort people’s memories of their loved ones. This story is also about unbearable heartache and unbreakable bonds.

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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