And the Mountains Echoed

Product Information

It was the kind of love that, sooner or later, cornered you into a choice: either you tore free or you stayed and withstood its rigor even as it squeezed you into something smaller than yourself.” Like [Hosseini’s] previous books, the new novel is a complex mosaic, a portrait of the Afghan diaspora as it is folded into the West and of those left behind. . . . The book is elevated by a strong sense of parable and some finely drawn characters and is inventively constructed as it leaps from voice to voice.”— Esquire But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you. Like a puzzle. Vous comprenez? Like you have missed the beginning of a story and now you are in the middle of it, trying to understand.” Dehghan, Saeed Kamali (2017-06-23). "Why Iran has 16 different translations of one Khaled Hosseini novel". The Guardian . Retrieved 2018-12-25.

And the Mountains Echoed opens like a thunderclap. . . . [Hosseini] asks good, hard questions about the limits of love. . . . Love, Hosseini seems to say, is the great leveler, cutting through language, class, and identity. No one in this gripping novel is immune to its impact.”— O, the Oprah Magazine Abdullah and his sister Pari go to sleep listening to this story and knowing that the next day they will have to say goodbye as well. Their father found a job in Kabul and decided to take the girl with him while leaving his son to take care of Parwana, their step mother, and Iqbal, their half-brother. However, so was the bond between the two siblings that Abdullah insisted on tagging along on the journey through the desert, towards the capital city. Once they arrived in Kabul, they are introduced to the Wahdati family, the wealthy employers of their step uncle, Nabi. Naila Wahdati takes great interest in them and in the end it is revealed that Pari was to be adopted by her and her husband thus separating her from her brother. a b c Smith, Wendy (May 23, 2013). "Khaled Hosseini sets 'And the Mountains Echoed' against Afghan history". Los Angeles Times . Retrieved August 24, 2013. The novel begins with a tale of extraordinary sacrifice that has ramifications through generations of families. What do you think of Saboor’s decision to let the adoption take place? How are Nila and Nabi implicated in Saboor’s decision? What do you think of their motives? Who do you think is the most pure or best intended of the three adults? Ultimately, do you think Pari would have had a happier life if she had stayed with her birth family? I thank you. The div grinned. May I ask what evil I have committed against you so as to warrant death?Wrought with mastery, And the Mountains Echoed is not just a well spun tale, but an accomplishment of the most elusive of literary challenges—the humanization of a war ravaged population in the eyes of the very people complicit in their ruin.”— Daily Beast He walked for many, many days. He walked until the sun was a faint red glow in the distance. Nights, he slept in caves as the wind whistled outside. Or else he slept beside rivers and beneath trees and among the cover of boulders. He ate his bread, and then he ate what he could find—wild berries, mushrooms, fish that he caught with his bare hands from streams—and some days he didn’t eat at all. But still he walked. When passersby asked where he was going, he told them, and some laughed, some hurried past for fear he was a madman, and some prayed for him, as they too had lost a child to the div. Baba Ayub kept his head down and walked. When his shoes fell apart, he fastened them to his feet with strings, and when the strings tore he pushed forward on bare feet. In this way, he traveled across deserts and valleys and mountains. Two homes form twin focal points for the novel: the family home of Saboor, Abdullah, and Pari—and later Iqbal and Gholam—in Shadbagh; and the grand house initially owned by Suleiman in Kabul. Compare the homes and the roles they play in the novel. Who has claims to each house? What are those claims based on? How do the questions of ownership complicate how the characters relate to one another? The div raised one clawed hand. Yes. Yes. You’ve come to kill me. I know. But surely I can be granted a few last words before I am slain.

In the final chapter of the book, Abdullah’s daughter, Pari II, explains how her father reunited with Pari, her aunt and namesake. Pari II is a good, devoted daughter who’s given up art school to take care of her mother, who dies of cancer, and later her ailing father, who’s beginning to suffer from dementia. Pari II receives a call from Pari, and arranges for Pari to come to California, where Abdullah has settled. When Pari and Abdullah reunite, Abdullah is at first skeptical that Pari is who she claims to be. He realizes the truth when Pari sings him the song Abdullah used to sing her when they were both children. This happy reunion doesn’t last long, however, as Abdullah begins to lose his memory. One day he screams at Pari, accusing her of being a thief and a liar. Take this, the div said. The creature handed Baba Ayub a small glass flask containing a dark liquid. Drink this upon your journey home. Farewell. They say, Find a purpose in your life and live it. But, sometimes, it is only after you have lived that you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one you never had in mind.” A character in the story Saboor tells his children, Baba Ayub is a simple farmer forced to make an impossible choice: he must sacrifice one of his own children to appease an evil creature, the… Hosseini weaves a gorgeous tapestry of disparate characters joined by threads of blood and fate. . . . In this uplifting and deeply satisfying book, Hosseini displays an optimism not so obvious in his previous works. Readers will be clamoring for it.”— Library Journal (starred review)

Hosseini stated his intentions to make the characters more complex and morally ambiguous. Continuing the familial theme established in his previous novels, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, And the Mountains Echoed centers on the rapport between siblings. Besides Abdullah and Pari, Hosseini introduced two other sibling and sibling-like relationships—the children's stepmother Parwana and her disabled sister Masooma and an Afghan-American doctor named Idris and his cousin Timur.