Measuring the repercussions

Khaled Hosseini's debut novel, The Kite Runner, set in his native Afghanistan against the backdrop of its tumultuous 20th century history, was wildly successful. Hosseini, who has lived in the United States since he was 15, published the novel two years after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 by the US and its allies. A moving portrait of friendship, fidelity, faith and fundamentalism, it shone a spotlight on the country and its people, extricating them from both the obfuscating shroud of the Taliban and the narrow lens of the occupying force.

He followed it with A Thousand Splendid Suns, in which he trained his humanistic eye on two Afghan women, tracing their lives across five decades from the 1960s, the violent upheavals of the nation intruding upon and influencing them in myriad ways. And the Mountains Echoed, his third novel, continues to build on the themes of love and exile of his two previous books.

The book's epigram, a verse by the 13th-century Sufi poet Jelaluddin Rumi, is revelatory: "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there." The story opens with Saboor, a poor peasant, telling a bedtime story to his two children, 10-year-old Abdullah and three-year-old Pari: a div, a monster who comes down from his mountain retreat to steal children, visits Baba Ayub's village, taps on his hut and waits for the farmer to offer him a child. If he fails to make a voluntary offering, the div will take all the children.

A night of silent weeping and furious thinking later, Ayub is no closer to a decision. As the rays of the sun look set to emerge from behind the mountains, the father gathers several stones, inscribes the name of a child on each, tosses them into a bag and asks his wife to pick one. When she refuses, Ayub must accomplish the dreaded task. He picks a stone and ends up forfeiting his youngest and favourite son to the div.

This story within a story telegraphs the fate that will soon befall Saboor and his children. From his village of Shadbagh, Saboor sets off with his daughter, pulling her in a red wagon, towards Kabul where he has been promised a job. But Abdullah and Pari are inseparable, the brother having raised his little sister after their mother died in childbirth.

Despite a thrashing, Saboor cannot deter the boy, who joins them on the journey. In Kabul, a city that mesmerises them with traffic lights and fancy cars, their uncle Nabi escorts them to the palatial household where he works as a cook and chauffeur and where, ostensibly, Saboor will find work.