Quick Book Reviews Blog

Khaled Hosseini has established himself as one of the most prominent writers of the decade with classics such as The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns . In these stories Hosseini spends much of his time focusing Middle Eastern families, their values, beliefs, morals, actions, decisions, and ultimately, their fate. In And the Mountains Echoed , Hosseini follows a similar theme, but needless to say, it is explored from a very different angle than in his previous works of writing. To give you a brief idea of what the story is all about, it starts off with a father telling his children a story about a young boy who, after being taken by an ogre, discovers that his fate was far from being as terrible as he imagined it. On the next day, the father gives his daughter away to a very wealthy man living in Kabul.

If there is one thing Khaled Hosseini is known for more than anything else, it’s his ability to create an authentic, believable, and basically true-to-life Middle Eastern setting for his stories, something very few other authors can even come close to managing.  The first time he displayed his skills in front of the whole wide world he wrote The Kite Runner , a novel about a very unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and his servant’s son, one that lasts over thirty years in a country torn apart by war and countless conflicts.

I find that in the present day, there is a distinct lack of Middle Eastern literature... and I’m not just talking about novels that take place in that exotic part of the world. I’m talking about books written by people who can give first-hand accounts of what life and certain historical events were/are like...  I’m talking about authentic books in which authors know well both the beauty and ugliness of it all. By chance, I happened to stumble across A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, an Afghan-born novelist and physician.