And the Mountains Echoed

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Khaled Hosseini considers pain, love, and familial love to be the primary themes of And the Mountains Echoed. Pari is Abdullah's younger sister who, at the age of three, is sold by her father Saboor to the wealthy Wahdati couple in Kabul. However, the love between the two was so strong that the old man decided to pursue the Div and avenge his boy.

Unfortunately, Eric dies from a stroke and Paris is forced to retire due to severe arthritis, her only source of support being her daughter Isabell and her grandchildren. Introspective and perfectly paced, Hosseini’s microcosmic plot spares no expense with sensory details. The novel begins with a tale of extraordinary sacrifice that has ramifications through generations of families.Hosseini stated, "The question is raised a number of times about whether memory is a blessing — something that safeguards in all the things that are dear to you — or is memory a curse — something that makes you relive the most painful parts of your life, the toil, the struggle, the sorrows. Wahdati's neighbors, meanwhile, move to the United States with their children after the Soviet invasion. Wahdati tries to assure him that the arrangement is for the best and he will understand when he is older. He appears in And the Mountains Echoed in Chapter Six, where he’s the lover of both Nila Wahdati and (later) Pari Wahdati. Ultimately, do you think Pari would have had a happier life if she had stayed with her birth family?

In the final chapter of the book, Abdullah’s daughter, Pari II, explains how her father reunited with Pari, her aunt and namesake. When he recovers he volunteers at the same hospital and ultimately becomes a plastic surgeon and an aid worker in Kabul. Hope that perhaps, wherever she is now, she has found as much peace, grace, love, and happiness as this world allows. Hosseini has admitted to suffering from a sense of survivor’s guilt: he wishes his family hadn’t left the country before the Soviet-Afghan War began.Pari Wahdati arranges a trip to Afghanistan and after seeing her childhood home (the Wahdatis’), she remembers several things, but is still plagued with loss. Like [Hosseini’s] previous books, the new novel is a complex mosaic, a portrait of the Afghan diaspora as it is folded into the West and of those left behind. A story is like a moving train," as Hosseini has one of his many tale-telling characters remark, "no matter where you hop onboard, you are bound to reach your destination sooner or later.