The best-selling author who garnered international fame for his examination of life and culture in Taliban-era Afghanistan has completed a new book that returns to his homeland and is an extended mediation on the exile’s plight – the pain of separation and the complicated nature of memories.
Khaled Hosseini’s new book, “And The Mountains Echoed,” follows in the footsteps of his previous efforts, “The Kite Runner,” which topped the New York Times best-seller list and became a Hollywood movie, and “A Thousand Splendid Suns.” Hosseini left Afghanistan when he was a boy, but his vivid recollections and observations did much to inform Western audiences about the people and place in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.
His new novel -- his first in six years -- draws on his personal experience of losing family and his homeland as a child.
“The Afghanistan I remember has been obliterated by years of war,” he said.
“And the Mountains Echoed” begins with an impoverished father’s desperate decision to give his 3-year old daughter to a wealthy family in Kabul. The novel follows the little girl and her devastated older brother, tracing the consequences of their separation through an extended cast of characters.
“It’s really about how we as people are bound by our sense of loss,” says Hosseini. “We all are defined by things we have lost, things that feel vital to us, that have left gaping holes in our lives.”
While Hosseini’s mind remains preoccupied by his native land and that sense of separation, he said he recognizes the flip side of the exile’s experience; Namely, how someone can grow attached to his new home.
“I can’t extricate Afghanistan from myself. And at the same time, I’ve lived in the United States for 32 years. I’ve fathered children here and made my life here. So I feel bound to both,” he said.
In addition to writing novels, Hosseini serves as a Goodwill Envoy to UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, and has established the Khaled Hosseini Foundation, which provides humanitarian assistance to the people of Afghanistan.
