A Year in Reading: Khaled Hosseini

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler: I thought this was a gripping, big-hearted book about a family’s falling apart after a young daughter is sent away. Who – or what – the young daughter is can’t be discussed without revealing a major spoiler, suffice it to say it is a whopper. The book is far deeper and more ambitious, however, than its central conceit would lead one to think. Through the tender voice of her protagonist, Fowler has a lot to say about family, memory, language, science, and indeed the question of what constitutes a human being.

Khaled Hosseini is one of most widely read and beloved novelists in the entire world, with more than ten million copies sold in the United States of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, and more than thirty-eight million copies sold worldwide in more than seventy countries. Hosseini is a Goodwill Envoy to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the UN Refugee Agency, and the founder of The Khaled Hosseini Foundation, a nonprofit which provides humanitarian assistance to the people of Afghanistan. His newest novel, And the Mountains Echoed, came out this year and was an instant international bestseller.