Khaled Hosseini: 'I have reconnected with Afghanistan in an intimate way'

The bestselling author of The Kite Runner and And the Mountains Echoed on storytelling, family dynamics and his new relationship with the country he left in the 1970s

Khaled Hosseini's debut novel, The Kite Runner (2002), was an unusual bestseller about a friendship between a young man and a servant, set against a violently unravelling Afghanistan and written in the early mornings before Hosseini went to work as a doctor. It was followed by A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007), another affecting book rooted in friendship, this time between two Afghan women. In his latest, And the Mountains Echoed , a brother and sister are separated as children it is his most intricately ambitious so far (together, at last count, his novels have sold a staggering 42.5m). What they have in common is that they told by a master storyteller. They make you feel you are sitting at his feet listening.

Hosseini has been creative in another sense too, using his earnings to establish the Khaled Hosseini Foundation, a charity that helps marginalised people in Afghanistan, offering humanitarian assistance in collaboration with the UN.

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