A Year in Reading: Khaled Hosseini

December 9, 2013 | 2

coverWe 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.

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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.