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Hosseini is particularly interested in puzzling out the ways in which more privileged people decide what they can and can't do for those who live in misery. Whether the miserable are members of one's own family is relevant, and yet not the most reliable guideline, since sometimes it's most difficult psychologically to reach out to family members — and since we sometimes don't even know who our family members are. When the Kabul home that belonged to Pari's adoptive parents is abandoned and turned into a hospital, we meet a Greek doctor who has given his life to helping the wretched of Afghanistan, yet is unable to be near his own lonely mother. We also follow the story of two well-off Afghan brothers who grow up near the Kabul house. When they later emigrate to America, each has to decide how heroic a role to play in the never-ending suffering of their native country — and just how much luxury he can stomach in his own life, given the contrast to life back home.

But it's the plight of Abdullah and Pari, living apart yet tied together permanently by the tender, brotherly care he took of her as a child, that holds the novel together. In the tale their father tells, the little boy taken by the giant had always worn a bell around his neck. In old age the father in the story has forgotten the boy, but still sometimes thinks he hears the sound of a bell, and doesn't understand "why a wave of something, something like the tail end of a sad dream, always swept through him whenever he heard the jingling."

You may find, as I did, that Abdullah and Pari's story lingers with an effect not unlike that "wave of something." It's a reminder that much of what both connects us and makes us individuals is invisible, but no less real for that.

Maria Russo, a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review, is a former editor and writer at the Los Angeles Times, The New York Observer, and Salon. She is the editor in chief of Pasadena Magazine.

Read an excerpt of And the Mountains Echoed