New Hosseini novel lures readers online
NEW YORK — Khaled Hosseini, whose novels have sold more than 38 million copies worldwide, knows what a lucky man he is.
“What separates me from someone in the streets of Kabul is such a thin line,” says the Afghan-American author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. “What I have is, in many ways, an undeserved gift.”
Hosseini’s new novel, And the Mountains Echoed, released Tuesday, will likely become one of the summer’s favourite reads.
And coinciding with the book’s release, Penguin Canada launched what it believes is a first-of-its-kind web project: an evolving, page-forpage digital exploration of the novel that will be shaped by reader contributions. The Toronto-based publishing house launched EchoProject. ca, an interactive companion series that is expected to eventually feature 402 pages, each correlating to the corresponding page in Hosseini’s multigenerational family story.
As of the Tuesday launch, the project featured the first 16 pages, the last of which was a video message from the Afghan-born author and physician.
Other pages posted so far include one with video of a man with tears in his eyes, another with graphics reflecting the current weather and temperature in Afghanistan, and one with an image of a fist that opens with a mouse click.
Penguin Canada now wants readers of the novel to determine the rest of the project by emailing an idea for a page and explaining their inspirations and interpretations.
The publishing house says it has also reached out to some “big Canadian personalities,” asking them to contribute their vision for their favourite page.
“I think the people who have read the book will be all the more engaged with it, because they’d know what each page represents,” Nicole Winstanley, president and publisher of Penguin Canada, said in a telephone interview.
“But anybody can really visit it, anybody that knows of Hosseini’s work and is curious or is just interested in books and ways to experience books.”
Some future pages have already been spoken for.
Hosseini, for instance, has chosen page 17; Winstanley will take page 337; and Sarah McGrath, vice-president of Riverhead Books who edited the novel, has dibs on page 400.
Hosseini, 48, considers the book his most ambitious, with a complex narrative and stops in Paris, San Francisco (the author lives in northern California) and Greece.
Like his previous novels, And the Mountains Echoed features Afghan characters and tells a story about families, this one spanning decades and generations. The title was inspired by a William Blake line, “And all the hills echoed,” with “hills” changed to “mountains” to suit Afghanistan’s imposing terrain. Hosseini didn’t know what the book would be called when he began it, but he had an image in his mind that had struck him like a “thunderclap” — a man walking across the desert, pulling a wagon behind him, with a three-year-old girl inside. A boy, around 10, trails them.
“Something about that particular dynamic and image seemed to me so striking and compelling,” he said. Determined to know more about these people he decided the children were siblings, “that they guilelessly adore each other and something difficult is going to happen” in Kabul. He would call the boy Abdullah, and the girl Pari. He would, once again, draw upon old memories of Afghanistan, a country he left as a child.
He had no idea how the novel would turn out and considers it far harder to describe than A Thousand Splendid Suns, which he summarizes as “the struggles of women in Afghanistan over the last 30 years.” But he does know what he wanted to express — how we all are united by loss, by failure, by what we’re missing.
“Life just doesn’t care about our aspirations, or sadness,” he said. “It’s often random, and it’s often stupid and it’s often completely unexpected and the closures and the epiphanies and revelations we end up receiving from life, begrudgingly, rarely turn out to be the ones we thought (we’d have).”
Few authors have enjoyed so many nice surprises. Ten years ago, Hosseini was a doctor who had written stories all of his life but never thought anyone wanted to read them. He wrote The Kite Runner out of love, with no plans to publish it, only to see the novel become a word-of-mouth sensation after its 2003 release.
“I more or less stumbled into a writing career,” he said, adding that he was happy to give up medicine. (Meanwhile, he has set up a foundation that provides humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan.)