He is a master of that deeper narrative principle: get your audience where they want to go, but not in the way they expect.ĭigressing across a web of family connections, he delays gratification without frustrating desire. 'A story is like a moving train,' as Hosseini has one of his many tale-telling characters remark, 'no matter where you hop onboard, you are bound to reach your destination sooner or later.' True enough, but Hosseini isn't restricted to any single route, or mode of transport. From the moment the realisation dawns that Saboor is going to give Pari to the wife of a wealthy man in Kabul, Hosseini saturates the various layers and characters of his novel with a yearning for the moment that brother and sister will reunite. This is what Saboor, the poor Afghan father telling the story, is himself about to do to his three-year-old daughter, Pari, who has an unusually powerful bond to her brother, Abdullah. The father can gift his favourite son a better life by giving the child away, never to see him again. A div, or demon, draws a father into a terrible pact.

The opening myth is a substance that permeates a network of tales, its meaning developing and diversifying across 400 pages. A father presents his children with a fable as they embark on a journey through the mountains of the book's title, a myth to prepare them for the coming rupture in their lives, one that will echo down generations.īut the threat of bland formula is instantly dissolved in Hosseini's elemental narrative chemistry. 'You want a story and I will tell you one,' Hosseini begins, with a device that informs his readers exactly what is what and who is who. There will be nostalgia for old Afghanistan, ironised by its clashes with western freedoms and shattered by modern wars there will be leaps in time, speaking of the cruel tricks of history through wildly emotive tales of loss, betrayal and redemption.

This effectively marketed product informs its consumers that, as there was in The Kite Runner, here there will also be siblings separated by hardship and tragedy. Its narrative wares are clearly advertised in the book-jacket blurb to reassure his tens of millions of worldwide readers that they will be getting the brand they want. T here is a bland, almost corporate flavour to the title of Khaled Hosseini's third book, suggesting a large but windy Afghan epic.

Khalid hussain and the mountains echoed