And the Mountains Echoed

And the Mountains Echoed is the third novel by the Afghan American writer Khaled Hosseini, published in 2013. It is his first book that does not follow one character from beginning to end.

Instead there are nine chapters, each told from the point of view of somebody different, and the whole of it is held together by one event. That event is the decision of a father in a poor village to sell his small daughter to a couple in Kabul who cannot have children of their own.

Abdullah is ten when it happens and Pari is three, and the novel goes on to follow what the separation does to both of them and to the people around them. The book takes in the years before the sale and the decades that come after it. Hosseini has said that he wanted these characters to be more complicated and more morally ambiguous than those of his earlier books.

The book was published by Riverhead Books, and it continues the interest in family relationships that runs through his first two novels.