Like the ripples of a pebble falling into a lake, the decision of an Afghan villager to give his daughter to a wealthy couple for adoption will have an impact from the 1950s to the present day, from Kabul to Paris and San Francisco--while, simultaneously, the cataclysmic takeover of Kabul by the Taliban will have even more deeply felt repercussions. In And the Mountains Echoed, Khaled Hosseini presents a multitude of windows into the souls affected by these events. The novel's rich kaleidoscope of images coalesces around one theme: the powerful legacy of family ties within the maelstrom of history.
Unlike Hosseini's previous novels, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, And the Mountains Echoed never lingers with one point-of-view character. Instead, he links multiple narratives together by blood or circumstance, tying them to a single mansion in Kabul and a desolate Afghan village. Hosseini's remarkable talent for engendering empathy for his characters is in full force; the opening sentences of each section introduce a distinct personality and worldview that draws the reader in, whether he's writing about the village boy who loses his treasured sister to adoption, their shy stepmother with a terrible secret in her past or the adopted daughter herself and her attempts, as a well-heeled Parisienne, to grapple with her Afghan identity. In later years, the narrative crosses the Atlantic to touch upon the experience of Afghans living as immigrants.
The thread connecting all of these stories is Afghanistan, but it is also the seismic shifts of identity created by war and emigration. Readers get a glimpse of a cosmopolitan, culturally brilliant Kabul--and feel the tragedy when the curtain of fundamentalism and violence descends. --Ilana Teitelbaum, book reviewer at the Huffington Post