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And the Mountains Echoed
Author:
Hosseini, Khaled
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Class:
Fiction
Age: Adult
Language: English
Demand: Moderate
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LC: PS3608
Print Run: 1500000
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ISBN-13: 9781594631764
LCCN: 2013004004
Imprint: Riverhead Books
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Pub Date: 05/21/2013
Availability: Available
List: $28.95
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Hardcover
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Physical Description:
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404 pages ; 25 cm
H 9.5",
W 6.5",
D 1.37",
1.6 lbs.
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LC Series:
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Brodart Sources:
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Brodart's Blockbuster List
Brodart's Insight Catalog: Adult
Brodart's TOP Adult Titles
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Bibliographies:
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Fiction Core Collection, 17th ed.
Fiction Core Collection, 18th ed.
Fiction Core Collection, 19th ed.
Library Journal Bestsellers
Los Angeles Times Bestsellers List
New York Times Bestsellers List
New York Times Bestsellers: Adult Fiction
Publishers Weekly Bestsellers
Texas Lariate Reading List
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Awards:
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BookPage Best Books
Booklist Editors Choice
Booklist Starred Reviews
Library Journal Best Books
Library Journal Starred Reviews
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Starred Reviews:
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Booklist
Library Journal
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TIPS Subjects:
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Domestic Fiction
Young Adult
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BISAC Subjects: |
FICTION / Literary
FICTION / Family Life / General
FICTION / Sagas
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LC Subjects:
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Afghanistan, Fiction
Community life, Fiction
Domestic fiction
Families, Fiction
Interpersonal relations, Fiction
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SEARS Subjects: |
Afghanistan, Fiction
Community life, Fiction
Domestic fiction
Families, Fiction
Interpersonal relations, Fiction
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Reading Programs: |
Accelerated Reader Level:
6.1
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Points: 20.0
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| Annotations |
| Brodart's TOP Adult Titles | 01/01/2013 |
| Brothers and sisters mold us into who we are to become, but love and sacrifice also come with betrayal and bitterness as a multigenerational-family tale unfolds. 384pp., 2M, Auth res: San Jose, CA, Tour |
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| Starred Reviews: |
| Booklist | 04/01/2013 |
| Saboor, a laborer, pulls his young daughter, Pari, and his son, Abdullah, across the desert in a red wagon, leaving their poor village of Shadbagh for Kabul, where his brother-in-law, Nabi, a chauffeur, will introduce them to a wealthy man and his beautiful, despairing poet wife. So begins the third captivating and affecting novel by the internationally best-selling author of The Kite Runner (2003) and A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007). An immense, ancient oak stands in Shadbagh, emblematic of the complexly branching stories in Hosseini's vital, profound, and spellbinding saga of family bonds and unlikely pairings forged by chance, choice, and necessity. We meet twin sisters, one beautiful, one plain; one an invalid, the other a caretaker. Two male cousins, one a charismatic wheeler-dealer; the other a cautious, introverted doctor. A disfigured girl of great valor and a boy destined to become a plastic surgeon. Kabul falls and struggles to rise. Shadbagh comes under the rule of a drug lord, and the novel's many limbs reach to Paris, San Francisco, and a Greek island. A masterful and compassionate storyteller, Hosseini traces the traumas and scarring of tyranny, war, crime, lies, and illness in the intricately interconnected, heartbreaking, and extraordinary lives of his vibrantly realized characters to create a grand and encompassing tree of life. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The immense popularity of Hosseini's previous books ensures a high-profile promotional campaign and mounting word-of-mouth excitement in anticipation of the release of his first new novel in six years. Seaman, Donna. 416p. AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, c2013. |
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| Library Journal | 09/19/2013 |
| There are certain things that a dude will only grudgingly admit, one of which is that Hosseini is a superb writer. This will surely add to the accolades and untold millions of dollars that Mr. H., author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, already has. This book is wonderfully told with a delicious sense of pacing and sensuality. What you might not know is that Hosseini is my nemesis; he stole every good idea in all his books directly from me. But I'm not jealous (the hell I'm not), nor do I hold a grudge (yeah, right). VERDICT Dudes, focus on the good news: you're free to read KH without fear of being called a milquetoast. 416p. LJ Reviews Online Review. LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2013. |
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| Journal Reviews |
| BookPage | 05/01/2013 |
| If you could guarantee your child a rich life in exchange for forfeiting your right to see her, would you do it? The question informs the engrossing new novel by Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini, whose surprise international bestseller, The Kite Runner, so enchanted readers 10 years ago. The child in question is Pari, whose long-suffering father arranges her adoption by a well-to-do Afghan and his half-French wife, Nila. Pari's brother Abdullah stays behind, and their fates diverge in predictable ways: Pari becomes a professor of mathematics while Abdullah ends up selling kabobs. The novel jumps backward and forward in time, with settings as diverse as Monterey, Paris, Kabul and Athens. The relationships between the far-flung cast members--including Idris, an Afghan-American physician, modeled probably on Hosseini himself; a Greek plastic surgeon and adventure photographer; a former Afghan jihadi and his iPod-toting son--are sometimes obscure. But the female characters steal the show, most notably Nila, who gleefully explodes the stereotype of the downtrodden Afghan woman. An acclaimed poet, as fond of men as she is enslaved to Chardonnay, she evokes a time when Kabul was downright chic. Then there's the flip side of the book's opening dilemma. Having escaped, what obligation does one have to the motherland? Can an expat enjoy success when his or her country so desperately needs help? "For the price of that home theater," Idris muses, "we could have built a school in Afghanistan." After a trip back, he experiences worse culture shock upon returning to America, a situation familiar to anyone with experience in both countries. Ultimately Idris decides that Afghanistan was "something best forgotten." But his story also suggests that life in America, with its stresses and mass distractions, is no Elysium either. Do Pari and Abdullah reunite? Hosseini certainly isn't given to facile resolutions. To the distances of space the novel adds the ravages of age. Ultimately, And the Mountains Echoed is about the human endeavor to transcend differences. Ken Champeon. 416pg. BOOKPAGE, c2013. |
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| Kirkus Reviews | 03/15/2013 |
| After two stellar novels set (mostly) in Kabul, Afghanistan, Hosseini's third tacks among Afghanistan, California, France and Greece to explore the effect of the Afghan diaspora on identity. It begins powerfully in 1952. Saboor is a dirt-poor day laborer in a village two days walk from Kabul. His first wife died giving birth to their daughter Pari, who's now 4 and has been raised lovingly by her brother, 10-year-old Abdullah; two peas in a pod, but "leftovers" in the eyes of Parwana, Saboor's second wife. Saboor's brother-in-law Nabi is a cook/chauffeur for a wealthy, childless couple in Kabul; he helps arrange the sale of Pari to the couple, breaking Abdullah's heart. The drama does nothing to prepare us for the coming leaps in time and place. Nabi's own story comes next in a posthumous tell-all letter (creaky device) to Markos, the Greek plastic surgeon who occupies the Kabul house from 2002 onwards. Nabi confesses his guilt in facilitating the sale of Pari and describes the adoptive couple: his boss Suleiman, a gay man secretly in love with him, and his wife, Nila, a half-French poet who high-tails it to France with Pari after Suleiman has a stroke. There follow the stories of mother and daughter in Paris, Markos' childhood in Greece (an irrelevance), the return to Kabul of expat cousins from California and the Afghan warlord who stole the old village. Missing is the viselike tension of the earlier novels. It's true that betrayal is a constant theme, as it was in The Kite Runner, but it doesn't work as a glue. And identity? Hosseini struggles to convince us that Pari becomes a well-integrated Frenchwoman. The stories spill from Hosseini's bountiful imagination, but they compete against each other, denying the novel a catalyst; the result is a bloated, unwieldy work. 384pg. KIRKUS MEDIA LLC, c2013. |
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| Library Journal Prepub Alert | 11/05/2012 |
| And the Mountains Echoed explores how we love and care for others, particularly family members, and how choices we make can have long-term consequences not just for us but for those we hold dear. That's hardly surprising, coming from an author who says "I am forever drawn to family as a recurring central theme of my writing." Hosseini's work here is multigenerational, focusing on brothers and sisters, thus broadening his scope. 384p. LJ Prepub Alert Online Review. LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2012. |
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| Publishers Weekly | 03/18/2013 |
| Hosseini's third novel (after A Thousand Splendid Suns) follows a close-knit but oft-separated Afghan family through love, wars, and losses more painful than death. The story opens in 1952 in the village of Shadbagh, outside of Kabul, as a laborer, Kaboor, relates a haunting parable of triumph and loss to his son, Abdullah. The novel's core, however, is the sale for adoption of the Kaboor's three-year-old daughter, Pari, to the wealthy poet Nila Wahdati and her husband, Suleiman, by Pari's step-uncle Nabi. The split is particularly difficult for Abdullah, who took care of his sister after their mother's death. Once Suleiman has a stroke, Nila leaves him to Nabi's care and takes Pari to live in Paris. Much later, during the U.S. occupation, the dying Nabi makes Markos, a Greek plastic surgeon now renting the Wahdati house, promise to find Pari and give her a letter containing the truth. The beautiful writing, full of universal truths of loss and identity, makes each section a jewel, even if the bigger picture, which eventually expands to include Pari's life in France, sometimes feels disjointed. Still, Hosseini's eye for detail and emotional geography makes this a haunting read. Agent: Robert Barnett, Williams & Connolly. (May). 416p. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, c2013. |
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9781594631764,dl.it[0].title
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