And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini (2013)

I have read The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns by Hosseini, so I knew I wanted to read this, but was a bit reluctant, as the Thousand Splendid Suns was such a difficult read in the terms of the brutality suffered by women. Luckily, this was still an intense story, but less brutal. At one point the teller of the story says that enough has been written about the war in Afghanistan, that he will not repeat that, only as far as it affected the character himself, and even then that time period was skipped over quickly.

This is a story of deep connections between people. It starts out with brother and sister are separated when they are young, the sister being sold off to a childless couple in Kabul. We slowly hear the stories of the people around these two siblings - the uncle who brings the girl to the couple and serves the couple. After the man suffers a stroke and the wife and girl move to Paris, the uncle continues to care for the man until his death. During the war much of the splendor of the home is stolen, but later a group of international doctors rent the place. We hear the story of the woman and her adopted daughter in Paris. We hear the story of one of the doctors from Greece. This story seemed most out of place when I started reading it, but as the author pulled me into this man's story, it just reminded me how the fates of people from around the world get intertwined. We see what happens to the small village where the brother and sister grew up - interestingly from a child's viewpoint. We hear of the brother's fate in San Francisco from his daughter, though there were references to the brother's Afghan restaurant before we got his story.

It is an art to tell a coherent story from so many voices, each moving the story forward piece by piece. The fact that Hosseini could speak on behalf of so many characters of all ages, of both genders, from various cultures, even throwing in a gay character in the Afghan world, speaks volumes of his skill as a writer. Since I "read" the audio version, it too was interesting, as  it was read by various voices - both male and female with various levels of foreign accents, which also brought the story to realistic life.