We will take a look at some of the best books by Khaled Hosseini.
Khaled Hosseini is an Afghan-American author who has published 4 books, and is most known for writing The Kite Runner. Though, he is more than just an author. He is also an ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and even used to be a physician.
Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul, but his family moved to the United States to seek asylum due to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan when he was 15. He didn’t return to Afghanistan until he was 38.
He worked as a physician in California until he wrote The Kite Runner, and its success allowed him to retire from medicine to work on writing full time.
After The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini wrote 3 more books over the course of 15 years. Each of the books share a common theme, family, and are almost always set in Afghanistan.
Khaled Hosseini has sold most than 55 million copies of his novels in over 70 countries. 31.5 million of these are The Kite Runner, which makes it one of the most sold books of all time. He is one of the most widely read authors in the world.
The Kite Runner
The Kite Runner was the first book that Khaled Hosseini wrote. The book was published in 2003 and was a huge success. It was the best selling novel in the United States in 2005, and was turned into a movie in 2007. The Kite Runner is 400 pages long.
The inspiration for The Kite Runner happened when Khaled Hosseini found out that when the Taliban took control of Afghanistan they banned kite flying. He took this personally because as a child who grew up in Afghanistan, kite flying was one of his favorite sports.
Khaled Hosseini started writing a short story about two boys who fly kites in Kabul. Sadly, the story was rejected by publications, but a few years later he found the story and started to expand on it. This would eventually become The Kite Runner.
The book follows two friends Amir, who is a well-off Pashtun boy, and Hassan, who is the son of Amir’s father’s servant. The two boys spend their time flying kites together in the peaceful city of Kabul. Though Amir often gets annoyed by Hassan they are close friends, and Hassan respects Amir very much.
The two’s friendship comes to an unfortunate end after an event that Amir cannot forgive himself for. The rest of the story involves Amir trying to redeem himself for his inability to act to help his friend by rescuing Hassan’s son.
The novel takes place over the course of many events in Afghanistan including the fall of the Afghan monarchy, the invasion of the Soviet Union, a mass exodus of Afghan refugees going to Pakistan, and the rise of the Taliban.
The Kite Runner explores many themes. It is the first of his books in which the main theme is family. This book specifically focuses on a father-son relationship. However, there are other themes in the book including guilt and redemption.
Khaled Hosseini himself talked about the themes in the book saying, “Because its themes of friendship, betrayal, guilt, redemption and the uneasy love between fathers and sons are universal, and not specifically Afghan, the book has been able to reach across cultural, racial, religious and gender gaps to resonate with readers of varying backgrounds.”
Again, talking about themes of the novel, Khaled Hosseini said, “Whenever I read stories about Afghanistan my reaction was always tinged with guilt. A lot of my childhood friends had a very hard time. Some of our cousins died. One died in a fuel truck trying to escape Afghanistan. Talk about guilt. He was one of the kids I grew up with flying kites. His father was shot.”
Fun Fact: The Kite Runner spent 101 weeks on the New York Times best seller list. The book spent 3 weeks at number one!
If you are here because you loved the book, we wrote a whole post about books like The Kite Runner.
A Thousand Splendid Suns
The second novel that Khaled Hosseini wrote was called A Thousand Splendid Suns. He published this book in 2007, and again, it was a huge success. This book is 432 pages long.
Talking about the writing process for A Thousand Splendid Suns Khaled Hosseini said, “As I began to write, as the story picked up the pace and I found myself immersed in the world of Mariam and Laila, these apprehensions vanished on their own. The developing story captured me and enabled me to tune out the background noise and get on with the business of inhabiting the world I was creating.”
He also said about A Thousand Splendid Suns, “I hope the book offers emotional subtext to the image of the burqa-clad woman walking down a dusty street in Kabul.”
A Thousand Splendid Suns follows two main characters, Miriam and Laila. Often the chapters switch back and forth between the two stories.
The book starts off with Miriam, who lives with her mother in a hut in the mountains. Her father is a wealthy businessman, who unfortunately had an illegitimate child with Miriam’s mother. That child would be Miriam. She tries to get closer to her father in Herat, but it would ultimately have her end up being forced to marry a man from Kabul named Rasheed.
Laila is younger than Miriam, but extremely terrifying events lead her to becoming Rasheed’s second wife. Because of the events in Afghanistan at the time many people were forced to flee their homes including Laila’s childhood friend, Tariq.
At first Miriam does not get along with Laila, but eventually they bond over their shared dislike of their husband. They understand that as women in Afghanistan they are forced to be oppressed due to the recent takeover by the Taliban, only allowed to do what their husband’s give them permission to do.
A Thousand Splendid Suns has many themes. Like many of his other novels, Khaled Hosseini chose family as a theme in this book. In this book, he focuses more on a mother-daughter type of relationship.
Another theme has to do with how women are treated in Afghanistan. During the Taliban rule women had suffered major discrimination including having their movement restricted, being forced to cover, being domestically abused, and being banned from having social, political, and illegal rights. In fact, Khaled Hosseini was inspired to write this book after hearing about how women were treated under the Taliban.
Fun Fact: A Thousand Splendid Suns spent 103 weeks on the New York Times best seller list. The book spent 15 of those weeks at number one!
And the Mountains Echoed
And the Mountains Echoed is the third of the books by Khaled Hosseini. This book was published in 2013, and has 448 pages. While this book wasn’t as popular as the first two, it still had its own successes. It won a Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction in 2013 and a DSC Prize for South Asian Literature in 2015.
Khaled Hosseini said he got the idea from the book on a trip to Afghanistan where he heard stories from the villagers. One of the stories inspired the book.
While talking about how he got the idea of the book Khaled Hosseini said, “The novel began very, very small, and it began with a single image in my head that I simply could not shed. It was the image of a man walking across the desert and he’s pulling a little Radio Flyer red wagon, and in it there’s a little girl about 3 years old, and there’s a boy walking behind him, and these three people are walking across the desert.”
After publishing the book And the Mountains Echoed, Khaled 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.”
Khaled Hosseini definitely changed up his writing style in And the Mountains Echoed. Unlike his previous books this one is told through the eyes of nine different people. The book is kind of like a collection of short stories with each character getting their own stories. This is also the first book of his not to center around the Taliban.
And the Mountains Echoed starts off with a very surprising event that is the cause for the events in the rest of the book. This foundation event is when 10-year-old Abdullah’s father sells his 3-year-old sister, Pari, to a couple in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Family, particularly sibling relationships, is a main theme in the book. And the Mountains Echoed deals with how families react with each other, nurture, honor, betray, wound, and even sacrifice something for each other. Explore the actions that siblings, cousins, and caretakers are willing to take in the moments that matter the most.
Fun Fact: And the Mountains Echoed spent 33 weeks on the New York Times best seller list, as well as being in the top 10 on Amazon before it was even released.
Sea Prayer
Sea Prayer is the fourth and most recent book written by Khaled Hosseini. The book was published in 2018, and is 48 pages long. Sea Prayer is actually an illustrated book about the Syrian refugee crisis. It was illustrated by Dan Williams.
Khaled Hosseini was inspired to write Sea Prayer about the Syrian refugee crisis, particularly one child’s death, named Alan Kurdi. Alan, a Syrian-Kurdish boy, along with his parents, drowned in the Mediterranean Sea trying to reach Europe due to the crisis.
Sea Prayer is told through a letter from a father to a son. Both have fled the Syrian Civil War, and just like Alan Kurdi, will take the extremely dangerous crossing of the Mediterranean Sea. The father writes the letter on the Eve before they will leave to cross the sea.
The father reflects on the past and of their life in Homs, Syria, both before and after the war broke out. He tells the story of how quickly the city erupted into chaos, and how his country turned from a home to a war zone.
Khaled Hosseini donated the proceeds from the book to the UN Refugee Agency. He also stated that he wanted to pay tribute to the families who, just like Alan Kurdi, had to leave their home and uproot their lives due to the civil war. With the book he was able to help fund the efforts to give relief to refugees all around the world.
Fun fact: Sea Prayer was originally created as a virtual reality experience!
There are 4 books by Khaled Hosseini: The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, And the Mountains Echoed, and Sea Prayer.