"And the Mountains Echoed" by Khaled Hosseini

 Abdullah is a poor boy living with his father, his sister Pari, his stepmother and his baby half-brother Iqbal in a dirt-poor village in Afghanistan. His uncle's rich employer wants a daughter and Abdullah's father arranges that she should adopt Pari; Abdullah is devastated. This book follows the consequences for all those who are touched by the story: for Uncle Nabi and for Markos, the Greek doctor who comes to live in Bani's house, and for the next generations.

If there is a theme, it is that some people are born beautiful and have all the luck; others are ill or crippled, and ugly and crooked and plain; that some people have the gift of caring for the afflicted and that some can only hide themselves away: 

• "All her life, Parwana had made sure to avoid standing in front of a mirror with her sister. It robbed her of hope to see her face beside Masooma's, to see so plainly what she had been denied. But in public, every stranger's eye was a mirror." (3)
• "I learned that the world didn't see inside of you, that it didn't care a whit about the hopes and dreams, and sorrows, that lay masked by skin and bone." (8)
• "Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly." (8)

This book is beautifully written. There were moments when my heart-strings were tugged and there  are perfect descriptions:

• "A delicate crescent moon cradled the dim ghostly outline of its full self." (2)

There are also moments full of the poetry of parenthood:

• "When I was a little girl, my father and I ad a nightly ritual.  After ... he had tucked me into bed, he would sit at my side and pluck bad dreams from my head with his thumb and forefinger. His fingers would hop from my forehead to my temples, patiently searching behind my ears, at the back of my head, and he'd make a pop sound - like a bottle being uncorked - with each nightmare he purged from my brain. He stashed the dreams, one by one, into an invisible sack in his lap and pulled the drawstring tightly. He would then scour the air, looking for happy dreams to replace the ones he had sequestered away. I watched as he cocked his head slightly and frowned, his eyes roaming side to side, like he was straining to hear distant music. I held my breath, waiting for the moment when my father's face unfirled into a smile, when he sang Ah, here is one, when he cupped his hands, let the dream land in his palms like a petal slowly twirling down from a tree. Gently, then, so very gently - my father said all good things in life were fragile and easily lost - he would raise his hands to his face, rub my palms against his brow and happiness into my head." (9)

Hosseini has also written The Kite Runner, his break-through novel, and A Thousand Splendid Suns

Selected quotes:

• "When you have lived as long as I have ... you find that cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same color." (1)
• "He kept returning. Every night he could be heard whimpering mournfully and every morning they found him lying by the door, chin on his front paws, blinking up at his assailants with melancholy, unaccusing eyes." (2)
• "A pathetic shadow, torn between her envy and the thrill of being seen with Masooma, sharing in the attention as a weed would, lapping up water meant for the lily upstream." (3)
• "A life lived from the backseat, observed as it blurred by." (4)
• "Their fights didn't so much end as dissipate, like a drop of ink in a bowl of water, with a residual taint that lingered." (4)
• "I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us." (4)
• "Most people have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But what really guides them is what they're afraid of. What they don't want." (8)

June 2022; 402 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God