Hosseini writes, Pari has felt “the absence of something, or someone, fundamental to her own existence”: sometimes “it was vague, like a message sent across shadowy byways and vast distances, a weak signal on a radio dial, remote, warbled. She suspects that she might have been adopted and resolves to one day travel back to Afghanistan to find out the truth about her past.Īll her life, Mr. Pari becomes a mathematician, marries a drama teacher and has three children. In the decades to come, Pari will grow up in Paris with Nila, a sometime poet and full-time narcissist who leaves her husband behind in Kabul to lead a self-indulgent, bohemian life impossible in Afghanistan. Pari is left with them to grow up with all the privileges of wealth her father has allowed the Wahdatis to adopt her. One day their father, Saboor, takes them on a long, arduous trip to the big city of Kabul, where their Uncle Nabi works for a wealthy couple, Suleiman and Nila Wahdati. The family has no money, and one of their stepmother’s babies has already died from the cold. He has taken care of her since their mother died giving birth to her. Abdullah is 10, and his beloved baby sister, Pari, is 3.

When we first meet the novel’s two central characters, they are children living in a remote, impoverished Afghan village.

Whereas “The Kite Runner” focused on the dynamic between fathers and sons, and “Splendid Suns” on that between mothers and daughters, this novel tells its story through the prism of sibling relationships - a theme refracted through the lives of several pairs of brothers and sisters. Hosseini’s narrative gifts have deepened over the years, enabling him to anchor firmly the more maudlin aspects of his tale in genuine emotion and fine-grained details. “Mountains,” too, has more than its share of contrivance and sentimentality, but Mr. In “The Kite Runner” and “Suns,” this could yield some soapy, melodramatic plot twists and characters who were very, very good or very, very bad. And it shares a similar penchant for mapping terrain midway between the boldly colored world of fable and the more shadowy, shaded world of realism.

Hosseini says the title was inspired by William Blake’s poem “Nurse’s Song: Innocence,” which refers to hills echoing with the sound of children’s voices.) It grapples with many of the same themes that crisscross his early novels: the relationship between parents and children, and the ways the past can haunt the present. “Mountains” spans several generations and moves back and forth between Afghanistan and the West. Khaled Hosseini’s new novel, “And the Mountains Echoed,” may have the most awkward title in his body of work, but it’s his most assured and emotionally gripping story yet, more fluent and ambitious than “The Kite Runner” (2003), more narratively complex than “A Thousand Splendid Suns” (2007).

And the mountains echoed author