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A short Khaled Hosseini biography describes Khaled Hosseini's life, times, and work. Also explains the historical and literary context that influenced The Kite Runner.

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Amir recalls an event that happened twenty-six years before, when he was still a boy in Afghanistan, and says that that made him who he is. Before the event, he lives in a nice home in Kabul, Afghanistan, with Baba, his father. They have two servants, Ali and his son, Hassan, who are Hazaras, an ethnic minority. Baba's close friend, Rahim Khan, is also around often. When Afghanistan's king is overthrown, things begin to change. One day, Amir and Hassan are playing when they run into three boys, Assef, Wali, and Kamal. Assef threatens to beat up Amir for hanging around with a Hazara, but Hassan uses his slingshot to stop Assef.

The story skips to winter, when the kite-fighting tournament occurs. Boys cover their kite strings in glass and battle to see who can sever the string of the opposing kite. When a kite loses, boys chase and retrieve it, called kite running. When Amir wins the tournament, Hassan sets off to run the losing kite. Amir looks for him and finds Hassan trapped at the end of an alley, pinned with his pants down. Wali and Kamal hold him, and Assef rapes him. Amir runs away, and when Hassan appears with the kite, Amir pretends he doesn't know what happened. Afterward, Amir and Hassan drift apart. Amir, who is racked by guilt, decides either he or Hassan must leave. He stuffs money and a watch under Hassan's pillow and tells Baba that Hassan stole it. When Baba confronts them, Hassan admits to it, though he didn't do it. Shortly after, Ali and Hassan move away.

The story jumps to March 1981. Baba and Amir are in the back of a truck as they escape from Kabul, which was invaded by the Soviets and has become a war-zone. After a hellish journey, they make it to Pakistan. Two years later, Baba and Amir live in Fremont, California. While Baba works at a gas station, Amir finishes high school and goes to college. Baba and Amir sell things at a flea market on Sundays, and Baba sees an old friend, General Taheri. Amir notices General Taheri's daughter, Soraya. When Amir finally speaks to her, General Taheri catches him and tells him there is a proper way to do things. Not long after, Baba is diagnosed with lung cancer. Amir asks Baba if he will get General Taheri's consent for Amir to marry Soraya. General Taheri accepts the proposal. They hold the wedding quickly because of Baba's health, and Baba dies a month later. Amir and Soraya try unsuccessfully to have a baby while Amir works on his writing career.

Amir gets a call from Rahim Khan. Rahim Khan is sick and wants Amir to see him in Pakistan. Amir meets him a week later, and Rahim Khan tells Amir about the devastation in Kabul. He says things only got worse after the Soviets were forced out. Now the Taliban rule by violence. He has a favor to ask of Amir, but first he needs to tell him about Hassan. When Baba and Amir left Afghanistan, Rahim Khan watched their house. Out of loneliness and because he was getting older, he decided to find Hassan. He convinced Hassan and Hassan's wife, Farzana, to come back to Kabul with him. Farzana and Hassan eventually had a little boy, Sohrab. A few years later Rahim Khan went to Pakistan for medical treatment, but he received a call from a neighbor in Kabul. The Taliban went to Baba's house and shot Hassan and Farzana and sent Sohrab to an orphanage.

Rahim Khan wants Amir to go to Kabul and bring Sohrab back to Pakistan, where a couple lives that will take care of him. He tells Amir that Baba was Hassan's father, and Amir agrees to do it. In Afghanistan, Amir finds the orphanage where Sohrab is supposed to be, but he is not there. The orphanage director says a Taliban official took Sohrab a month earlier. If Amir wants to find the official, he will be at the soccer stadium during the game the next day. Amir goes to the game, and at half-time, the Taliban put a man and a woman in holes in the ground and the official Amir is looking for stones them to death. Through one of the Taliban guards, Amir sets up a meeting with the official.

When they meet, Amir tells the official he is looking for a boy, Sohrab, and the official tells the guards to bring the boy in. Sohrab is wearing a blue silk outfit and mascara, making him appear more feminine and suggesting that the men sexually abuse him. The official says something Amir recognizes, and suddenly Amir realizes the official is Assef. Assef says he wants to settle some unfinished business. He beats Amir with brass knuckles, breaking Amir's ribs and splitting his lip. Sohrab threatens Assef with his slingshot, and when Assef lunges at him, Sohrab shoots him in the eye, allowing Amir and Sohrab to escape. As Amir recovers in the hospital, he finds out there never was a couple that could care for Sohrab. Amir asks Sohrab to live with him in the U.S., and Sohrab accepts.

The adoption officials tell Amir that adopting Sohrab will be impossible since he can't prove Sohrab's parents are dead, and Amir tells Sohrab he may have to go back to an orphanage. Amir and Soraya figure out a way to get Sohrab to the U.S., but before they can tell Sohrab, Sohrab tries to kill himself. He lives, but he stops speaking entirely. Even after they bring Sohrab to California, Sohrab remains withdrawn. One day, they go to a park with other Afghans. People are flying kites. Amir buys one and gets Sohrab to fly it with him. They spot another kite and battle it. Using one of Hassan's favorite tricks, they win. Sohrab smiles, and as the losing kite flies loose, Amir sets off to run it for Sohrab.

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The Kite Runner: Full Book Summary | SparkNotes

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Amir recalls an event that happened twenty-six years before, when he was still a boy in Afghanistan, and says that that made him who he is. Before the event, he lives in a nice home in Kabul, Afghanistan, with Baba, his father. They have two servants, Ali and his son, Hassan, who are Hazaras, an ethnic minority.

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Khaled Hosseini never thought he would be published -- especially in English.

Khaled Hosseini first took us on a tumultuous journey to 1970s Afghanistan in the 2003 best-seller The Kite Runner, and followed it up in 2007 with A Thousand Splendid Suns, a novel about two women in Hosseini's homeland. On May 21, his third novel, And the Mountains Echoed, hits store shelves. Unlike his previous works, it jumps across continents, weaving together a tale about love and loss across generations. Here, the author talks about his newest title, his view on writing, and his hopes for Afghanistan with Wajahat Ali, a writer and attorney.

Your first two novels were set mostly in Afghanistan. For your latest, the narrative, although rooted in Afghanistan, branches out across generations, time periods, and the globe: Greece, Paris, and California. What inspired you to "leave Afghanistan" and tackle a global canvas?

It was a conscious decision, and the natural flow of the book demanded it to be more global. I wanted to create a story-world that didn't necessarily begin with Kabul and end in Kandahar. I wanted to expand the geographic milieu for my characters in part because I've travelled a lot in the past 10 years and I wanted to stretch my literary legs as a writer. Many writers write boundless and wonderful books practically set in the same town for their entire career, and I admire them for that, but I wanted to go out for a breath of fresh air.

This book started so small, so small, with such a simple idea of a father and his two little children walking across the desert toward Kabul, and it just kept snowballing. And I had this particular image of this trunk of a tree with all these branches that went everywhere -- it wasn't a conscious decision to say I'm going to go France now, and then Greece, it just sort of developed organically that way. I wanted to see how far this story echoed and how many lives it could touch. I was excited to explore that.

You're also experimenting with style and structure. Each chapter shares a unique perspective from a different character but is connected to the overall mosaic. One chapter is in the form of a letter, another is a magazine interview, and most resemble short stories. Why break with traditional form and employ an unorthodox approach for this particular novel?

I was interested in looking at people and situations from different points of view. I thought the magazine interview (set in Paris) was a perfect vehicle to get inside the mind of this woman, a complicated poet, and get her idea of how she understands herself, her life, the world she was raised in and how she understands her place in it. Because we've seen her before in an earlier chapter, and she's been described through the eyes of her Afghan chauffer; she's also being described by her own daughter in the later chapters. So, we have these different accounts of a single person full of contradictions and conflicts and we get to see her from multiple angles.

This is unlike the sort of archetypal characters I wrote in Kite Runner. There weren't too many ways of interpreting those characters, like Hassan, who was such a lovely, angelic character. But there are different ways of interpreting this woman. That's what this shifting perspective and structure allowed me to do; see different people in different situations in different storylines from various angles.

Throughout the novel, I noticed the characters have a persistent need and search for an existing but absent love -- one that is eventually earned but often at a burdensome cost. For most characters, it seems sacrifice is necessary to truly appreciate and understand love's reality. This reoccurs in all your novels. What keeps drawing you to this theme?

You're right. It's something I'm drawn to. The very first chapter of this book, which is a fable, sets up questions that are raised throughout the book, albeit in a realistic way and not an allegorical way. It begins with the notion of "family." I'm from Afghanistan, and family is so central to Afghan life. It's the way you understand yourself, those around you, and how you perceive yourself in the world as part of this whole.

That opening fable asks what does family mean to you? To what length will you protect its unity? How far will you climb for it? How would you measure your own personal happiness or what you owe to those around you? Are you capable of inflicting a deep, resounding loss upon yourself out of love for someone else -- for the greater good? Also, I'm interested in the role of memory. In the fable, the div (a supernatural creature in Afghan folklore) gives the father, Baba Ayub, a potion and relieves him of the burden and pain of remembering his son, whom the div has captured and hidden in his fortress). This recurs at the end of the book with the character Abdullah.

Is memory how we make sense of the life that we've lived? Or is it a protector of that part of us that shine brightest? Or is it a curse that makes you re-live over and over the parts that hurt and pain you? Or is it both? These themes are raised in this relatively short fable but are revisited over and over in the novel.

You touched upon memory. What do you believe is the future of Afghan narratives and storytellers? Can it, and should it, escape the memory of 9-11 and finally move beyond discussions of the war on terror, the Taliban, and a narrative often associated with "the graveyard of empires."

As a writer living in exile, it's easier for me to do. Because my immediate reality is not living on the streets of Kabul where on every corner I can see a living reminder and living relic of the tragedy of the past 30 some-odd years. My reality of living in the U.S. is different and the distance affords me a compulsion to write about that is not as powerful as if I was writing from ground zero in Kabul. I think the enormity of what's happened to Afghanistan is far too powerful a black hole -- a vortex -- and a far too great a looming presence in the daily life of Afghan writers living there. Ultimately, you hope for a day when there's stories, songs, poetry coming out of Afghanistan that have nothing to do with the painful realities of the past 30 years. But, I think it's too early. I think the story is still unfolding. I think people are still licking their wounds, and there are people literally walking around still wounded, also psychologically wounded. It's far too great a reality to turn away from.

Speaking about stories, you've said that in Western media, "There are still myths about Afghanistan , such as that the country is stuck in the 12th century. There is an element of romanticism too, as well as the idea that Afghans hate the west." Your novel Kite Runner remains one of the most popular, mainstream narratives of Afghanistan for many Americans. There's been a criticism that your narratives have been used to promote stereotypical generalizations of Afghans and certain political agendas. What's your response?

I thought the perception of the region was more nuanced than it got credit for in The Kite Runner . The criticism is often leveled at me by older, more conservative, religious members of my community who feel the books have somehow blemished the reputation of Afghanistan in Western eyes. I don't see it that way. Most of my Western readers -- particularly Americans I've met for a better of a decade now -- never have that impression. My understanding is that the books have depicted a far different picture of Afghanistan that my accusers seems to fear it has.

Most readers have come away with a sense of empathy for Afghanistan and its people; there's been awareness of the richness of its culture, its heritage and its history. And as a result of connecting with the characters of my novels, they have achieved a more nuanced understanding of Afghanistan, and they certainly feel a sense of personal stake when they hear about an Afghan village being bombed. I've received emails and letters to this effect. So, many of these fears are unfounded. And I think by and large, I hope my novels have raised the profile of Afghanistan in a constructive and hopefully instructive way.

You say Kite Runner is an example of pop culture being constructive and instructive. You've also mentioned that American shows depicting Muslims and the Middle East, such as Homeland , need to be done in a "responsible way" and not push an agenda. What is your opinion of America's depiction of Central Asia and Muslims; if it's negative, how do you counteract it using storytelling?

I think it's transforming. In our traditional mainstream media news, I think there's far too many stories dealing with "the radicalized Muslim." We get a lot of those stories in the news media, and I do understand that -- I certainly think this is timely given what happened in Boston. Just like in Afghanistan, the story of 9-11 still looms large even more than a decade after it happened. That said, I do hope we can move away from that.

I see an opportunity for America to engage with the Muslim world. Perhaps we haven't done it to the fullest extent. For example, in Afghanistan, we're looking at a very young population -- over 60 percent of Afghans are under the age of 25. And most of them are not radicalized or have any hopes or desires of becoming radicalized. There are people with energy, vigor, entrepreneurial dreams; people who want to engage the modern world through technology and education, and I hope we move towards a form of engagement with the Muslim world that is more constructive than simply depicting large sections of a billion people under umbrellas that are pejorative.

Speaking about new narratives, I want to go back to this novel in which you seem very comfortable merging classical, Afghan folklore storytelling with modern narrative fiction. This particular novel casually references the supernatural, such as divs and jinns. Often, it seems Western fiction condescends and rejects the mystical in favor of realism. Do you think Western fiction could benefit, or learn, from Afghan storytelling?

There is room for everything. I think if you reject a certain kind of storytelling you handicap yourself and limit your options. I think current Western contemporary fiction rejects even more than the mythical, it rejects the "sentimental" story. An instinct that has any aspirations of appealing to the reader on a deep emotional level is occasionally branded as sentimental in a kind of professorial, condescending way. My background has never been in literature. I've gone to medical school. So, I don't consider myself part of "that" world. So what is said does not affect me all that much. But I do think we are seeing an enrichment of contemporary fiction in this country by the rise of new, young voices from Pakistan, India, Iran and hopefully Afghanistan. This can only add dialogue, make it more interesting and instructive as well.

Aside from your career as a novelist, you've spent considerable time and energy as a goodwill ambassador to Afghanistan. That nation has endured decades of warfare and tragedy, most recently the post 9-11 U.S. invasion. What are the grievances that Afghans have with the U.S.? Is the rift irreparable, or can the wounds be healed?

There's an abandonment complex in Afghanistan which had its origin in the wake of the Afghan-Soviet war. I'll relate the generic Afghan voice I've heard over and over again in many Afghan communities, which says that once the Afghan-Soviet war was over and Afghanistan had served its purpose by playing a major role in the downfall of the Soviet Empire and ending the Cold War, the West abandoned Afghanistan and its people. Afghanistan was then exploited by thugs, the militia men, the Taliban and so forth. That is the main grievance leveled against the U.S. and its allies by the Afghan people. That has echoes to what we're seeing in Afghanistan now.

Afghan people are a sovereign people. It's well-documented that they don't like foreigners on their soil. However, there is an anxiety, a sense of trepidation about what will happen once U.S. and NATO forces fall back in 2014. Are we going to see a repeat scenario that we witnessed after the Soviet War? Is the country going to unravel and revert back to ethnic war of the 1990's? Is there going to be mass displacement of ethnic populations? Are we going to see another Afghan refugee crisis? Are we going to see the return of power of peoples for whom democratic ideals are not a priority? These are the views of the Afghan people, and the grievances they have against the West. They want the West to assure them they won't abandon them so it reverts back to this previous state.

We should remember that a great deal of promises were made to Afghanistan after 9-11. I happen to be one of those that say that significant things have been accomplished in Afghanistan. There's been improvement in the health care sector, education sector, and personal freedoms and so on. For many Afghans, however, the reality they currently face falls short of the expectations they had after the U.S. invasion of 2001. Much of that is also leveled against the current Afghan government and its shortcomings and inability to provide for the Afghan people.

Afghanistan's problems seem so overwhelming and insurmountable. What is the proper way for Americans to "help" Afghanistan and Afghan people?

People need to understand who the Afghans are and their wishes and aspirations. There's a myth that suggests that Afghans want the U.S. and the West to just give them all the money in the world and rebuild their country for them. I think it's important for Westerners to know that's not the case and it's not a constructive way to view Afghans.

Afghans are not beggars; they are fiercely proud and extremely resourceful. They are a very determined people who want to rebuild their country. What the Afghans do want is economic and civic space to accomplish these things. It's been a challenge to deliver this to them in the past 10 years. The U.S. has done some of it but it hasn't gone that far. There are more aid organizations in Afghanistan than you can count and the rebuilding needs are massive.

There is a fatigue when it comes to Afghanistan. This is a particular concern of my own. The Afghan narrative, I have noticed personally, has changed a lot in the past 10 years. People seem far more receptive to the idea of "let's support Afghanistan and its people, let's invest in the country and let's rebuild," but it's very hard to get traction for that particular story.

I understand why because this war has been long and costly in all sorts of ways. As an Afghan I can't help but hope that the gains that have been made in Afghanistan - and they are significant - that those gains are not lose once more when the U.S. packs its bags and leaves.

You have had a unique journey toward becoming a storyteller. A child of immigrants, you first became a physician and then a novelist at 36. In many immigrant communities, children are told to abandon their creative ambitions to pursue the safety of the "holy trinity" of professions: doctor, engineer, and businessman. As such, many of us have become successful professionals, but we haven't produced many modern artists. What's your advice to the aspiring creatives, especially the children of immigrants, who want to pursue their artistic passions but must deal with immense family and community pressures?

This is a brilliant question and touches upon something I've experienced firsthand. I think this is something that will sort itself out. Because the reality for the next generation, for example my children, is very, very different from mine.

When I came to the United States with my family in 1980, there were nine of us. We lived in a small house near East San Jose. We lived on welfare. In that kind of incredibly stringent, stressful environment where day-to-day life was uncertain and you're living on government sponsored aid, the idea of nurturing artistic aspirations is esoteric at best. You develop a sense that the world is unstable and you must make your future solid and stable and you have to make sure you never end up in this position again. For the parents, they think "Okay, our life is gone, but for the children, we have to make sure they don't live a life like this." So, they instilled in us the idea of getting a "serious" profession and the whole idea of "the holy trinity" that you mentioned.

I already see it being different for my children. I have a 10-year-old daughter and a 12-year-old boy and I don't think I've once told them that I want them to be a doctor, engineer, or lawyer, and I don't think I do want them to be those things. They live in a completely different world than I do with far more opportunities, far more chances, far more leisure to choose exactly what it is that speaks to them so they can pursue it.

I wanted to be a writer so badly growing up that coming to America as a 15 year old, not speaking a word of English, it seemed outlandish that I would make a living writing stories in a language I didn't speak. I think the next generation we will see musicians and artists and poets and painters and our usual motley crew of physicians and engineers and lawyers.

Rumi, the spiritual poet of Islam, was born in Afghanistan and wrote those beautiful words in Farsi. At the same time, we see that the Taliban's interpretation of Islam has initiated a reign of religious terror for the Afghan people. As a person who has lived in Afghanistan and frequently gone back, what role should religion play in modern Afghanistan, and can it be reclaimed from tyrants?

I wish it was quite that simple. I don't think the terrorists have necessarily co-opted the religion. I think the insurgents have conveniently and strategically tapped into an existing mindset in Afghanistan. Islam is alive in every facet of Afghan life. It dominates everything.

I am more or less a Westernized person at this point. I believe strongly in the separation of church and state. However, I'm not so naïve to think that day is coming for Afghanistan. Right there in the Afghan constitution it states that no law of the land shall contradict the principles of Islam, and that's open to all sorts of troublesome interpretations. For the time being, I see religion playing an important, dominant role in Afghan life, politics, and culture. Afghanistan is a deeply pious country. That's just the way it is.

The Taliban has taken religious principles to unacceptable extremes for the majority of the Afghan population. There is very little public support for the Taliban and polls have borne that out. But, it's not like the Taliban came and invented the burqa or child brides. The nucleus of those things were alive and well in the culture -- not everywhere, but certainly in the tribal provinces. There's certainly modernism in Kabul, but most of Afghanistan is rural and much of it is very, very conservative.

Your book begins with this famous English translation of a classic Rumi quote: "Out beyond of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there." They say in the 21st century the world is a battleground. So, where is this field and how do you think we can reach it?

The more we understand that we are connected; the more we understand that what happens in another region of the world echoes with us. The more we understand that we no longer live in a world that is insular, where the actions of other people, the fate of other people, the plight of other people who are different from us have no bearing on our life. The more that we understand those things, the more we will identify with each other. We will realize we all have common goals. It behooves us to help each other. It behooves us to come to each other's aid.

On the few occasions that people have asked me to speak at commencement ceremonies, the message I always tell this coming generation is that you cannot afford to say that you are alone. You cannot afford to pretend that what happens in Afghanistan, in Somalia, in Peru has no bearing on you. It does. The days of our living in a compartmentalized existence on this planet are dying. We have the internet; our modern life has completely changed that. It'll never go back to the way it was.

I can only hope that we can be in the field once we see how connected we are and how we are part of one giant organism. I perhaps echo your question's sentimentalism and idealism with my answer.

Your critics accuse you of sentimentality, but your sentimentalism also makes your stories beloved to the masses. If you can be self-critical and do a self-audit, what are your strengths and weaknesses as a storyteller?

I think my strength is in telling a story. That's my strength. I can keep a reader's interest. I can bring a sense of anxiety to every page; bring a sense that something's at stake in every page. Certainly that's my goal, but to what extent I've achieved it is for the reader to decide. I also write in a way that emotionally resonates with the audience. I want something to be at stake emotionally for every story I write. To some extent, the readers feel the same.

My weaknesses? I have a long list. I'm well aware of my limitations as a writer. I will never be stylish. I will never have a particularly interesting prose. When I read contemporary fiction, I recognize prose that is beyond my grasp.

I do think I have a modest but sturdy set of skills that have served me very well. They have allowed me to create stories that to readers at least, feel very authentic and connect with them on a deep human and emotional level. And that's good enough for me.

Wajahat Ali is a journalist, lawyer, and playwright. He is the author of the play The Domestic Crusaders, and the lead author of the investigative report Fear Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America.

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'Kite Runner' Author on Writing, Afghanistan, and His New Book

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Khaled Hosseini never thought he would be published -- especially in English. Khaled Hosseini first took us on a tumultuous journey to 1970s Afghanistan in the 2003 best-seller The Kite Runner, and followed it up in 2007 with A Thousand Splendid Suns, a novel about two women in Hosseini's homeland.

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here's no question that Khaled Hosseini merits the term "publishing phenomenon". His two heart-tugging, blockbuster novels, set in his native Afghanistan, offered simple tales of redemption and grace while the ugly realities of war in the country rumbled through the news. His debut, 2003's The Kite Runner, written in the early mornings before work as a doctor, was followed by 2007's A Thousand Splendid Suns. Together they've sold over 38m copies worldwide.

We meet on the eve of publication of his new novel, And the Mountains Echoed, in a midtown Manhattan hotel bar where Hosseini expresses relief at finally having a scotch in hand. He has a quiet self-possession, a creased handsomeness to him - perhaps more creased today than usual: mass international appeal also means mass international press demands. He explains that the new novel began with a single image: a man towing a small wagon through the desert at night. In the wagon are two children; a brother and sister.

"I heard these stories about what a harrowing ordeal wintertime is for families in Afghanistan," he says. "People are terribly afraid and they lose their kids. So, with this background, suddenly this image came out of the blue, delivered with pristine, perfect clarity. And I was like: who are these people? Where are they going?"

The answer - a desperate father is on his way to Kabul to sell one of his children - provides the genesis for the novel's many narratives. The agony of the siblings' separation echoes down generations and across continents.

Hosseini though, puts it simply: "The book is kind of like a fairytale turned on its head. You have a very painful rupture at the beginning and then this tearful reconciliation at the end, except the revelations and the reconciliations you're granted aren't the ones you're expecting. Which is how life is, really."

This isn't how the world appeared in Hosseini's fable-like previous books. Their characters are the kind EM Forster might have classified as "flat" rather than "round". The Kite Runner's Hassan, for example, is, as Hosseini puts it, "a lovely guy and you root for him and you love him but he's not complicated". Everyone in the new novel finds themself morally compromised at some point.

The most stark example of that, he says, "is the warlord - this sort of evil benevolent lord. And it's something I've seen in Afghanistan a lot, these charismatic, larger-than-life figures who people are simultaneously afraid of, in admiration of, dependent on."

The central and most resonant line of the novel, though, is spoken not by a person but by a div, a demonic giant of Afghan folklore. When a peasant's beloved son is taken by the creature, he sets out to rescue his child, knowing he will most likely be killed for his audacity. Instead, the div shows him his son playing happily with other children. The father has to decide whether to leave his boy there - happy and provided for - or to take him back to a harrowing and potentially short life in a village blighted by droughts. Despondent, he accuses the div of cruelty. Itreplies: "When you have lived as long as I have, you find that cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same colour."

Hosseini is 48 - not exactly Methuselan then, but old enough to look back on his first two novels and see a different writer: a writer for whom cruelty and benevolence were very much two different colours.

"Yeah, it looks like the work of somebody younger than me," he says, a little ruefully. "I'm glad I wrote them when I did because I think if I were to write my first novel now it would be a different book, and it may not be the book that everybody wants to read. But if I were given a red pen now and I went back ... I'd take that thing apart."

He was similarly exacting with this novel's ending. "I sort of dreaded this kind of Hollywood-ish thing and I could see it inching that way and was a little worried." Then he reread his first chapter, which includes the story of the div and the peasant father. It ends with an act of mercy: the div gives the man a potion that erases his memory, and with it, the pain of having lost his son. "And I was like, ah, this is how the book needs to end, with this idea of memory as a way that we make sense of our life. It's this amazing gift - to treasure all those things that matter to us the most, that form our identity. But it's also very cruel because we relive those parts of our lives that are so painful. I could see that if the reunion were to occur, it would occur on these terms and it wouldn't be the reunion we'd expect and perhaps the one we want."

Among Hosseini's most compelling creations in the new novel is Nila Wahdati, an alcoholic poet. One chapter takes the form of a Paris Review-style Q&A in which she's simultaneously charming and insufferable. "I didn't want her to be likable," he agrees. "I just wanted her to be real - full of anger and ambition and insight and frailty and narcissism."

Hosseini was born in Kabul in 1965, the first child of his diplomat father and teacher mother. Nila came, he says, from the kind of parties he remembers his parents throwing while he was a teenager in the 70s, when a certain stratum of Kabul's middle class was undergoing Westernisation.

"There would be really striking women in short skirts," he recalls. "Beautiful, very outspoken, temperamental, endlessly - in my young mind - interesting. Drinking freely, smoking. Nila is a creation from my memory of that kind of woman from that time and that place."

It was, however, a place that he left when he was just 11 years old. His father's work took them to Paris, and then, when the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan prevented them from returning home, they sought political asylum in the United States and settled in California. Hosseini, aged 15, was plunged into a San Jose high school, speaking no English.

"It was a culture shock," he says. "It was very alienating." Was he bullied? "Worse - I was completely ignored. I felt on the periphery of high‑school culture; one of those invisible creatures that walk the campus. I think it was a lot worse for my parents. My dad was a diplomat and my mum vice-principal of a high school and now she's a waitress at Denny's, working the graveyard shift, and my dad is a driving instructor."

He adds: "There's nothing wrong with those things, but it was a regauging of their place in life. In Kabul they knew everybody, but in California nobody cared."

The family lived on welfare and, determined to ensure financial security, Hosseini resolved to become a doctor. He graduated from the University of California in 1993 and then completed his residency in internal medicine at Los Angeles's Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in 1996.

One of the new novel's most powerful sections includes an Afghan-American doctor whose compassion is tested by a trip to his homeland. Hosseini, who says he doesn't miss medicine one bit, admits that the character is deeply autobiographical.

"I went back and I'm like, this is my home city," he says. "I learned to speak here, I got into my first fistfight here - and, at the same time, it's no longer home. I don't want to act the ugly, entitled Afghan-American and go around backslapping people, pretending I'm one of them, full of bonhomie. That's disingenuous. I wasn't here when those guys were getting blown to pieces, so I'm not going to act like I was now that things are better."

And Hosseini, of course, isn't really an average Afghan-American but a celebrity. Sales of The Kite Runner began snowballing when the book came out in paperback, and it spent 101 weeks on the US bestsellers list. In 2007 it was made into a film; the movie adaptation of A Thousand Splendid Suns is due in 2015.

In the past decade he has enjoyed several moments of disbelief. The first, he recalls, came on a flight when he realised the woman beside him was reading The Kite Runner. "She was reading my book! And I couldn't believe it. I didn't do anything, and she never said anything, but I noticed that she was really into it."

The second time: "I was watching TV and I flipped the channels just in time to catch myself as the answer to a Jeopardy! question." He smiles and shakes his head. "And then the phone rang and my cousin said, oh my God, are you watching Jeopardy!? So that was like: OK, people are reading my book."

But even while patients of his were coming in just to have their copies signed, he continued to work at the clinic for a year and a half. How long did it take him to think of himself as a writer? "Oh, a long time. And even now I'm a little ..." he trails off, with a quiet laugh. "It's a little pretentious - 'I'm a writer'. I can't take it seriously. It's just like, oh get over yourself, you know?"

That kind of humility has no doubt helped his status as book-club favourite - particularly, it seems, among women. "Literary fiction is kept alive by women," he says. "Women read more fiction, period. That said, I'm always thrilled and feel a great sense of pride when I see a 17-year-old varsity wrestler at a high school and he says, 'Man, I love your book and I wanna read more!'"

I ask him what is the most common thing fans tell him. "Oh, they say they cried." He gives a little laugh. "I feel ambivalent about that. I'm touched, but I don't want to be the guy that writes these books that make people cry. It presupposes a kind of calculated effort to extract a specific emotion out of the reader and that's not the way I work. Everything that happens happens because I feel it, you know? Whatever the readers feel when they're reading my books, I feel it tenfold when I'm writing it."

I ask him whether the knowledge of such an enormous readership wanting more of the same ever feels suffocating. "You would think, but I'm so involved in figuring out this puzzle that it saves me from all that stuff. The only fear that I have is what if that goes away ... I do live with the very real possibility that we don't have endless stories to tell."

Family, though, seems to be fruitful territory for him. "In Afghanistan, you don't understand yourself solely as an individual," he says. "You understand yourself as a son, a brother, a cousin to somebody, an uncle to somebody. You are part of something bigger than yourself. The things that happen within families ... I'm so fascinated by how people destroy each other and love each other."

And Hosseini shows me a picture on his phone of his two kids clutching the printed-out manuscript, thumbs up, mugging gleefully.

And the Mountains Echoed is published by Bloomsbury.

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Khaled Hosseini: 'If I could go back now, I'd take The Kite Runner apart'

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here's no question that Khaled Hosseini merits the term "publishing phenomenon". His two heart-tugging, blockbuster novels, set in his native Afghanistan, offered simple tales of redemption and grace while the ugly realities of war in the country rumbled through the news.

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Khaled Hosseini ( Persian: خالد حسینی‎ [ˈxɒled hoˈsejni]; ; born 4 March 1965) is an Afghan-American novelist, physician, activist, humanitarian, and UNHCR goodwill ambassador. His debut novel The Kite Runner (2003) was a critical and commercial success; the book, as well as his subsequent novels, have all been at least partially set in Afghanistan and has featured an Afghan as the protagonist.

Born in Kabul, Afghanistan, to a diplomat father, Hosseini spent some time living in Iran and France. When Hosseini was 15, his family applied for asylum in the United States, where he later became a naturalized citizen. Hosseini did not return to Afghanistan until 2003 when he was 38, an experience similar to that of the protagonist in The Kite Runner. In later interviews, Hosseini admitted to feeling survivor's guilt for having been able to leave the country prior to the Soviet invasion and subsequent wars.

After graduating from college, Hosseini worked as a physician in California, a situation he likened to "an arranged marriage". The success of The Kite Runner meant he was able to retire from medicine in order to write full-time. His three novels have all reached various levels of critical and commercial success. The Kite Runner spent 101 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list, including three weeks at number one. His second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007), spent 103 weeks on the chart, including 15 at number one while his third novel, And the Mountains Echoed (2013), remained on the chart for 33 weeks. In addition to writing, Hosseini has become a noted advocate for refugees, including establishing with the UNHCR the Khaled Hosseini Foundation to support Afghan refugees returning to Afghanistan.

Hosseini was born on March 4, 1965 in Kabul, Afghanistan, the eldest of five children. His father, Nasser, worked as a diplomat for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Kabul while his mother worked as a Persian language teacher at a girls' high school; both originate from Herat. Regarding his ethnicity, Hosseini stated, "I'm not pure anything. There's a Pashtun part of me, a Tajik part of me." His mother's family is believed to be from the Mohammadzai tribe of Pashtuns. Hosseini describes his upbringing as privileged. He spent eight years of his childhood in the upper class Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood in Kabul. Hosseini does not recall his sister, Raya, ever suffering discrimination for being a female, and he remembers Kabul as "a growing, thriving, cosmopolitan city", where he regularly flew kites with his cousins.

In 1970, Hosseini and his family moved to Iran where his father worked for the Embassy of Afghanistan in Tehran. In 1973, Hosseini's family returned to Kabul, and Hosseini's youngest brother was born in July of that year. In 1976, when Hosseini was 11 years old, his father secured a job in Paris, France, and moved the family there. They were unable to return to Afghanistan because of the April 1978 Saur Revolution in which the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) seized power. In 1980, shortly after the start of the Soviet-Afghan War, they sought political asylum in the United States and made their residence in San Jose, California. Hosseini, then aged 15, did not speak English when he first arrived in the United States. He describes the experience as "a culture shock" and "very alienating".

Despite their distance from the country's turmoil, the family was aware of the situations faced by a number of their friends and relatives. Hosseini explained:

We had a lot of family and friends in Kabul. And the communist coup, as opposed to the coup that happened in '73, was actually very violent. A lot of people rounded up and executed, a lot of people were imprisoned. Virtually anybody [who] was affiliated or associated with the previous regime or the royal family was persecuted, imprisoned, killed, rounded up, or disappeared. And so we would hear news of friends and acquaintances and occasionally family members to whom that had happened, [who] were either in prison or worse, had just disappeared and nobody knew where they were, and some of them never turned up. My wife's uncle was a very famous singer and composer in Kabul who had been quite vocal about his dislike for the communists and so on, and he disappeared. And to this day, we have no idea what happened to him. So that sort of thing, we began to hear news over in Europe of mass executions and really just horror stories. So it was surreal, and it also really kind of hit home in a very real way.

Hosseini graduated from Independence High School in San Jose in 1984 and enrolled at Santa Clara University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in biology in 1988. The following year, he entered the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, where he earned his M.D. in 1993. He completed his residency in internal medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles in 1997. He practiced medicine for over ten years, until a year and a half after the release of The Kite Runner.

In 2003, Hosseini published his first novel, The Kite Runner, the story of a young boy, Amir, struggling to form a deeper connection with his father and coping with memories of a traumatic childhood event. The novel is set in Afghanistan, from the fall of the monarchy until the collapse of the Taliban regime, as well as in the San Francisco Bay Area, specifically in Fremont, California. The novel was the best selling novel of 2005 in the United States, according to Nielsen BookScan. The Kite Runner was also produced as an audiobook read by the author. The Kite Runner has been adapted into a film of the same name released in December 2007. Hosseini made a cameo appearance towards the end of the movie as a bystander, when Amir buys a kite which he later flies with Sohrab.

Hosseini's second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, was published in 2007, and is also set in Afghanistan. The story addresses many of the same issues as Hosseini's first book, but from a female perspective. It follows the story of two women, Mariam and Laila, whose lives become entwined when Mariam's husband takes on Laila as a second wife. The story is set during Afghanistan's tumultuous thirty-year transition from Soviet occupation to Taliban control and post-Taliban rebuilding. The novel was released by Riverhead Books on May 22, 2007, at the same time as the Simon & Schuster audiobook. The adaptation rights of the novel were subsequently acquired by producer Scott Rudin and Columbia Pictures.

Hosseini's third novel And the Mountains Echoed was released on May 21, 2013. Prior to its release, Hosseini said:

I am forever drawn to family as a recurring central theme of my writing. My earlier novels were at heart tales of fatherhood and motherhood. My new novel is a multi-generational family story as well, this time revolving around brothers and sisters, and the ways in which they love, wound, betray, honor, and sacrifice for each other."

Hosseini is currently a Goodwill Envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). He has been working to provide humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan through the Khaled Hosseini Foundation. The concept for the foundation was inspired by the trip to Afghanistan that Hosseini made in 2007 with UNHCR, with the organisation raising funds to build homes for refugees returning to Afghanistan.

In 2018, Hosseini published an illustrated short story, Sea Prayer, inspired by the death of Alan Kurdi, a three year old refugee who drowned when trying to reach Europe from Syria. Proceeds from sales went to the UNHCR and the Khaled Hosseini Foundation.

As a child, Hosseini read a lot of Persian poetry, especially the works of poets such as Rumi, Omar Khayyám, Abdul-Qādir Bēdil, and Hafez. He has also cited a Persian translation of Jack London's as a key influence from his youth, in addition to translations of novels including Alice in Wonderland and Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer series. He has cited Afghan singer Ahmad Zahir as a key musical influence, choosing the songs "Madar' and "Aye Padesha Khuban" as his two Inheritance Tracks during an appearance on BBC Radio 4's Saturday Live, and naming Zahir as "the Afghan Elvis" and stating his music was "one of the seminal memories of my time in Afghanistan".

Hosseini is married to Roya and they have two children, Haris and Farah. The family reside in Northern California. He is fluent in Persian and Pashto, and has described himself as a secular Muslim.

Exclusive Books Boeke Prize

British Book Awards

Book Sense Book of the Year Awards

California Book Award Silver Medal

Goodreads Choice Award

In 2008, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.

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Khaled Hosseini ( Persian: خالد حسینی‎ [ˈxɒled hoˈsejni]; ; born 4 March 1965) is an Afghan-American novelist, physician, activist, humanitarian, and UNHCR goodwill ambassador. His debut novel The Kite Runner (2003) was a critical and commercial success; the book, as well as his subsequent novels, have all been at least partially set in Afghanistan and has featured an Afghan as the protagonist.

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Other Works by                            Khaled Hosseini

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Other Works by                            Khaled Hosseini

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Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, and moved to the United States in 1980. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, and And the Mountains Echoed. Hosseini is also a U.S. Goodwill Envoy to the UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and the founder of The Khaled Hosseini Foundation, a nonprofit that provides humanitarian assistance to the people of Afghanistan.

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The latest from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Kite Runner Khaled Hosseini responds to the heartbreak of the current refugee crisis with this beautifully illustrated short work of fiction for people of all ages, all over the world. "Hosseini's writing makes our hearts ache, our stomachs clench, and our emotions reel."...