And what a voice it is. Searing in its intensity, at once brutal, beautiful and heart-breaking, he writes of pain and trauma, love and loss, guilt and redemption, loyalty and revenge, hope and despair, dislocation and identity, barbarity and humanity. His characters' experiences are intensely personal, but the themes universal.
The Afghanistan-born Californian resident author's latest novel has been eagerly anticipated given the acclaim of his previous bestsellers, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, which chronicled the plight of boys and women respectively in the war-torn country.
While retaining much of the now-familiar territory, And The Mountains Echoed differs in several ways. The all-pervasive violence is substantially reduced. It seems as if Hosseini feels less of a need to dwell on the horrific details, leaving himself more space to tell a different story. Indeed, when one of the central characters,
Uncle Nabi (who has left his small village and become a cook and chauffeur to a wealthy childless Kabul couple, the Wahdatis), explains to Greek plastic surgeon Markos Varvaris, newly arrived in Kabul, ''you know well the recent history of this beleaguered country. I need not rehash for you those dark days. I tire at the mere thought of writing it, and, besides, the suffering of this country has already been sufficiently chronicled'', it feels like Hosseini is also speaking for himself and the reader.
The pain and violence are still there, however. Most of his characters are deeply scarred physically and/or emotionally, but the overt descriptions are fewer and unrelated to the Soviet or US forces, the Mujahedin or Taliban, which are relegated to the background.
The book also departs plot-wise from the previous ones. The characters to whom we are first introduced, Nabi's young niece and nephew Pari and Abdullah, whom the reader assumes are both central to the story, go their separate ways almost immediately, and the story picks up the threads of many other characters - family members, exiles, humanitarian workers - and travels through generations and back and forward in time and place, from 1952 to today, from Kabul to Paris, San Francisco and the Greek islands.
The constant changes in perspective contribute to the feeling of dislocation, with exiled characters whose losses are compounded with feelings of guilt made harder by time and distance.
Hosseini is a master of description and characterisation, managing to tease out a magical moment into several pages, or evoke a love affair, marriage and children growing up in mere paragraphs.
In many ways the novel doesn't go where the reader expects, but it goes to the heart of what it is to be human. As Nabi says: ''I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.''
In Hosseini's Afghanistan, the most ordinary thing remains survival. But even among hardship, loss and despair, he shows the human spirit will find the strength to seek love and connection. And sometimes find them.
- Helen Speirs is ODT books editor.
