Tag Archives: and the mountains echoed

And The Mountains Echoed –

And the Mountains Echoed - Khaled Hosseini

And the Mountains Echoed – Khaled Hosseini

I have read A Thousand Splendid Suns (too confronting) and The Kite Runner (loved it), so when someone offered to pass this one onto me I thought why not?

The blurb …

So, then. You want a story and I will tell you one…

Afghanistan, 1952. Abdullah and his sister Pari live with their father and stepmother in the small village of Shadbagh. Their father, Saboor, is constantly in search of work and they struggle together through poverty and brutal winters. To Adbullah, Pari, as beautiful and sweet-natured as the fairy for which she was named, is everything. More like a parent than a brother, Abdullah will do anything for her, even trading his only pair of shoes for a feather for her treasured collection. Each night they sleep together in their cot, their skulls touching, their limbs tangled. 

One day the siblings journey across the desert to Kabul with their father. Pari and Abdullah have no sense of the fate that awaits them there, for the event which unfolds will tear their lives apart; sometimes a finger must be cut to save the hand. 

Crossing generations and continents, moving from Kabul, to Paris, to San Francisco, to the Greek island of Tinos, with profound wisdom, depth, insight and compassion, Khaled Hosseini writes about the bonds that define us and shape our lives, the ways that we help our loved ones in need, how the choices we make resonate through history, and how we are often surprised by the people closest to us.

This had all of the lovely things about Hosseini’s writing – the feeling that it could be a spoken story and stories of Afghanistan before all of the wars. I am not sure that I can succinctly say what this novel is about – families, what people will do for their families, how easy it can be to abandon family, but also how we make new families.

More reviews …

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/26/mountains-echoed-khaled-hosseini-review

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/and-the-mountains-echoed-20130531-2ngt7.html

Leave a Comment

Filed under Fiction