And the Mountains Echoed / Khaled Hosseini / 404 pages / Literary Fiction

It is 1952, in a small village in Afghanistan. Abdullah and his sister Pari live with their father, stepmother and baby stepbrother. Abdullah raised Pari when their mother died in childbirth and the two are extremely close. In the afterword, Hosseini mentions that the title for the book was inspired by this phrase in a poem by William Blake: "The little ones lept, and shouted, and laugh'd/and all the hills echoed". However this idyllic upbringing is soon to be abruptly ended.

This is quite a different book to The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. Whilst a large part of the book is set in Afghanistan, the impact of the Russian war and the Taliban's rule is only peripheral to the narrative. This is a smaller book, about family relationships. Again and again, we explore the relationships between children and their parents, whether the children are biological or adopted, whether the adoption is known or a secret. And yet, while the stories are intimate, the story spans 60 years and the terrain is epic, moving from the Middle East to Europe to the US and back again. The book begins and ends with Abdullah and Pari, but in between the stories will encompass characters as diverse as a Bosnian nurse, an American doctor, a French poet, a Greek housewife and an Afghan warlord. All are connected - sometimes closely, sometimes remotely - to the central story. Many characters will face difficult ethical dilemmas and sometimes they respond in ways that surprise the readers.