But M aidan Sabz was a desolate place, and it didn’t There were other, more fortunate villages to the north, in the valleys, with fruit trees and flowers and pleasant air, and streams that ran with cold, clear water. Life in M aidan Sabz was hard for all its inhabitants. I will say that, in this regard, he was hardly alone.

His hands were always callused, and they often bled, and every night sleep stole him away no sooner than his cheek met the pillow.

At any given moment you could spot him in his field, bent at the waist, back as curved as the scythe he swung all day. Every day, he labored from dawn to sundown, plowing his field and turning the soil and tending to his meager pistachio trees. Because he had a large family to feed, Baba Ayub saw his days consumed by hard work. He lived with his family in a little village by the name of M aidan Sabz. Once upon a time, in the days when divs and jinns and giants roamed the land, there lived a farmer named Baba Ayub. I am counting on you, boy, while your sister and I are away. It’s late, and we have a long day of travel ahead of us, Pari, you and I. You want a story and I will tell you one. Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. This book is dedicated to Haris and Farah, both the noor of my eyes, and to my father, who would have been proudĬontents Also by Khaled Hosseini Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Acknowledgments Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. And the mountains echoed / Khaled Hosseini. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hosseini, Khaled.

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