After Suleiman dies and bequeaths the house to him, Nabi donates it as a residence for medical personnel caring for injured children in the wake of the Taliban’s expulsion. Nabi cares for Suleiman through the 1990s civil war and the Taliban’s brutal rule, glimpsed in his account through the damage inflicted on the Wahdati home by rockets and looters. Yet all her life Pari has been haunted by “the absence of something, or someone, fundamental to her own existence.” When we see them again in 1974, Nila’s lies have erased Pari’s past she has been raised to believe she is this drunken, furious woman’s biological daughter, and she doesn’t remember her lost brother. After Suleiman is crippled by a stroke in 1955, Nila leaves for Paris, seeking to free herself and Pari from the patriarchal restrictions imposed on Afghan women. The chronology is fragmented and fluid as multiple, intricately interconnected narrators advance their personal stories within the larger drama of Afghanistan’s ordeal. But this abandonment shatters Saboor as well he never tells another story.Įach of the subsequent narratives unfolds from its predecessor, a technique that echoes the classic form of “A Thousand and One Nights.” Though the novel is realistic in style, often grim in subject matter, the magic of storytelling infuses it with a tough sort of optimism, a faith that if people can’t necessarily wrest happiness from a hard world, they can at least achieve understanding. Her devastated brother is taken home to their village, forbidden by his father even to cry. The terrified girl is whisked away, screaming. Their Uncle Nabi has arranged for Pari to be adopted by his wealthy, childless employers, Suleiman and Nila Wahdati.

The children learn the dreadful significance of this particular tale when they arrive in Kabul. Saboor is usually authoritarian and uncommunicative, but every now and then he delights 10-year-old Abdullah and 3-year-old Pari with tales of magic beings and far-off lands that temporarily liberate their father’s imagination, beaten down by years of grinding labor and poverty. The novel opens in 1952, with a man on the eve of a journey telling his son and daughter a story about a villager forced to give his beloved youngest child to a malevolent div (or devil). Although Khaled Hosseini has lived in the United States since he was 15, he remains engaged in the struggles of his native Afghanistan, which he has made palpable for Western readers in two bestselling novels, “The Kite Runner” and “A Thousand Splendid Suns.” His beautifully written, masterfully crafted new book, “And the Mountains Echoed,” spans nearly 60 years of Afghan history as it investigates the consequences of a desperate act that scars two young lives and resonates through many others.

And the mountains echoed author