And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini

This novel, set in Afghanistan, begins with a father telling his two small children a folk story about a child being stolen from his parents by a div (ogre).  The stolen child is found by his father, who has to choose between bringing the child home to poverty and want, or leaving him in a wondrous, magical place surrounded by riches.

The day after telling this tale, the father sets off for Kabul, pulling his young daughter in a cart.  There he gives her to a wealthy couple who can't have children. They will give her a good home, and they will give him money to help his family survive the grinding poverty that killed his baby the year before, and that he is afraid will kill the rest of them without some help.

But the girl's older brother is heartbroken; the two of them have been bonded together since her birth. There is a hole in both their lives that nothing ever quite fills. The story spans half a century, and spans continents. It is a series of stories within a story, and ends in a bittersweet reunion.


417 pages