Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| The Kite Runner | 2003 |
| A Thousand Splendid Suns | 2007 |
| And the Mountains Echoed | 2013 |
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas
| Sea Prayer | 2018 |
About Khaled Hosseini
Khaled Hosseini is an Afghan-American novelist and former physician, born in Kabul on 4 March 1965, best known for “The Kite Runner” (2003) and “A Thousand Splendid Suns” (2007). All of his novels are set at least partly in Afghanistan and have Afghan protagonists.
Hosseini was the eldest of five children. His father worked for the Afghan foreign ministry and his mother taught Persian at a girls’ high school. The family lived in Tehran from 1970 to 1973 and moved to Paris in 1976, when his father took a job there. They were unable to go home after the Saur Revolution of April 1978, and in 1980 they sought political asylum in the United States and settled in San Jose, California. Hosseini was fifteen and spoke no English.
He graduated in biology from Santa Clara University in 1988, qualified as a doctor at the University of California, San Diego, in 1993 and completed his residency in internal medicine at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles in 1997. He practised for more than ten years, and gave up medicine about eighteen months after “The Kite Runner” was published.
“The Kite Runner” follows Amir, a boy from Kabul, from the fall of the Afghan monarchy to the collapse of the Taliban regime, and his attempt to atone for failing his friend Hassan. It spent 101 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was filmed in 2007. “A Thousand Splendid Suns” tells the story of two women, Mariam and Laila, who are married to the same man. It was number one on the same list for fifteen weeks and was adapted for the stage in San Francisco in 2017. “And the Mountains Echoed” (2013) has nine chapters, each told from a different character’s point of view, linked by a father’s decision to sell his young daughter Pari to a childless couple in Kabul.
Hosseini is a goodwill envoy for the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, and set up the Khaled Hosseini Foundation after a trip to Afghanistan with the agency in 2007. “Sea Prayer” (2018), a short book illustrated by Dan Williams, takes the form of a letter from a Syrian father to his son and was written in response to the death of Alan Kurdi. He lives in Northern California.