Khaled Hosseini | Signed First Editions

About Khaled Hosseini

Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul in 1965. His father was a diplomat in the Afghan Foreign Ministry and his mother taught Farsi and history at a high school in the city. It was a comfortable, cultured upbringing, the kind that exists now mainly in memory. In 1976 the Foreign Ministry relocated the family to Paris, and they were preparing to return to Kabul in 1980 when a communist coup and the Soviet invasion made that impossible. The Hosseinis sought and were granted political asylum in the United States, and moved to San Jose, California.

Hosseini graduated from Santa Clara University with a degree in biology in 1988, then went on to earn a medical degree from UC San Diego in 1993. He completed his residency at Cedars-Sinai and worked as a practicing internist in California through the late 1990s and early 2000s. Writing had never entirely left him, but medicine came first. He began work on his first novel in 2001, getting up at four in the morning to write before heading to his practice.

That novel, The Kite Runner, was published by Riverhead Books in 2003. Its subject, the friendship between two boys in pre-Soviet Kabul, the fracture of that friendship, and one man’s long road back to something like redemption, arrived at a moment when Western readers were hungry to understand Afghanistan as a place with a history, a culture, and a human texture that the news could not provide. The response was extraordinary. The Kite Runner spent 101 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, including three weeks at number one. The success of the book allowed Hosseini to leave medicine and write full-time. The film adaptation was released in December 2007, directed by Marc Forster. It brought the book to an even wider audience and lodged Hosseini’s name firmly in the cultural mainstream.

His second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007), was inspired by his observations of women in burkas during a 2003 visit to Afghanistan, and depicts decades of upheaval in the country through the relationship between two women bound together by circumstance and ultimately by something stronger. It spent fifteen weeks at number one on the New York Times bestseller list, selling over a million copies in its first week on sale. Where The Kite Runner had been, at heart, a story about fathers and sons, A Thousand Splendid Suns was about mothers and daughters, and about what women endure and how they survive. It sits firmly within historical fiction, rooted in the specific decades of Afghan history it chronicles with both precision and grief.

And the Mountains Echoed (2013) expanded the canvas further, following a brother and sister separated in 1950s Afghanistan, and tracing the consequences of that separation across generations and continents. It remained on the New York Times bestseller list for thirty-three weeks.

Beyond the novels, Hosseini has served as a Goodwill Envoy for UNHCR and established the Khaled Hosseini Foundation, which provides humanitarian assistance to Afghan refugees. His humanitarian work is not incidental to his writing; it grows from the same source, the same sense of obligation to the country he left as a boy and has spent his adult life trying, in various ways, to serve.

His books have now been published in over seventy countries and sold more than forty million copies worldwide. A Thousand Splendid Suns has also been acquired for adaptation as a limited television series, which, when it arrives, will introduce a new generation of viewers to Hosseini’s work. He remains one of the most widely read novelists of his generation, and his first editions, particularly the early Riverhead printing of The Kite Runner, are correspondingly scarce.