Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

It has been years since I've posted here, and I've read dozens of great books in this time, but I have just this moment closed the back cover of *And the Mountains Echoed* by Khaled Hosseini. His *The Kite Runner* and *A Thousand Splendid Suns* are, I think, more famous, but this one is one of the most moving books I've ever read. It is heartbreaking and complicated and really, really beautiful. There is a chapter that is certainly one of the most arresting passages I've ever read in which an entire lifetime of joys and sorrows between two friends is interspersed between the counting of the 120 seconds needed to expose a negative in a pinhole camera for a photo one takes of the other. It is almost a series of short stories rather than a single novel, but all the stories are interrelated with a single family in (and later from) Afghanistan. It jumps back and forward in time, and only lightly sketches the connections between characters and moments, so at times I would read several pages before figuring out that this chapter is from the point of view of the chauffeur who is also the brother of the mother and step-mother of the one who moved to Paris, and so on. This gives a good sense of how interwoven it all is: 

 (from here). 

The book is a heartbreaking, beautiful thing.