Then the blast, blissfully elsewhere, followed by an expulsion of breath and the knowledge that they had been spared for now while somewhere else, amid cries and choking clouds of smoke, there was a scrambling, a barehanded frenzy of digging, of pulling from the debris, what remained of a sister, a brother, a grandchild.īut the flip side of being spared was the agony of wondering who hadn't.

Laila saw the reflection of their half-lit faces in the pitch-black window, their shadows unmoving on the wall. They listened to the whistling, forks in midair, unchewed food in their mouths. Often it happened at dinner, when she and Babi were at the table. Like a defendant about to hear the verdict. The brief and interminable time of feeling suspended. It wasn't so much the whistling itself, Laila thought later, but the seconds between the start of it and impact. It's the whistling,' Laila said to Tariq, 'the damn whistling, I hate more than anything.' The writing of that first novel, The Kite Runner just kind of brought it all back to me.' 'I emotionally kind of lost touch with what was going on. The family requested and received political asylum in the United States, where Hosseini later went to medical school and became a physician.įor Hosseini, Afghanistan 'became this distant place suddenly for me,' he tells Renee Montagne. At the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, when Hosseini was 11, his father was working in the Afghan embassy in Paris. Hosseini was born in Kabul, the son of a diplomat and high-school teacher.

In it, Hosseini tells the story of two girls who grow close as women - unlikely friends who are brought together in the chaos of war.

His new novel is A Thousand Splendid Suns, a title that comes from a 17th-century poem - an ode to the city of Kabul. The Kite Runner told the story of two boys growing up in Kabul, inseparable until a betrayal - followed by war and flight from war - tore them apart. No one was more surprised than Khaled Hosseini when his first novel, set in Afghanistan, became a bestseller in America.

Khalid hussain a thousand splendid suns