EW can exclusively announce the new book from acclaimed best-selling author Hosseini. EW can exclusively announce Sea Prayer , the new book from Hosseini which features original illustrations from Dan Williams. Hosseini is best known for his phenomenon, The Kite Runner , his debut novel which was adapted into a film and has sold millions of copies in the U. His books in the past have contended with the rise and influence of the Taliban, as well as life in contemporary Afghanistan.
But this work is particularly poignant in its heartbreaking engagement with the refugee crisis. I believe this beautifully written, intensely moving story will be cherished by people of all ages, and all over the world. Sea Prayer will be published by Riverhead on Sept.
Among Hosseini's most compelling creations in the new novel is Nila Wahdati, an alcoholic poet. Hosseini was born in Kabul in , the first child of his diplomat father and teacher mother. Nila came, he says, from the kind of parties he remembers his parents throwing while he was a teenager in the 70s, when a certain stratum of Kabul's middle class was undergoing Westernisation. Drinking freely, smoking.
Nila is a creation from my memory of that kind of woman from that time and that place. It was, however, a place that he left when he was just 11 years old. His father's work took them to Paris, and then, when the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan prevented them from returning home, they sought political asylum in the United States and settled in California.
Hosseini, aged 15, was plunged into a San Jose high school, speaking no English. I think it was a lot worse for my parents. My dad was a diplomat and my mum vice-principal of a high school and now she's a waitress at Denny's, working the graveyard shift, and my dad is a driving instructor. He adds: "There's nothing wrong with those things, but it was a regauging of their place in life.
In Kabul they knew everybody, but in California nobody cared. The family lived on welfare and, determined to ensure financial security, Hosseini resolved to become a doctor. He graduated from the University of California in and then completed his residency in internal medicine at Los Angeles's Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in One of the new novel's most powerful sections includes an Afghan-American doctor whose compassion is tested by a trip to his homeland.
Hosseini, who says he doesn't miss medicine one bit, admits that the character is deeply autobiographical. I don't want to act the ugly, entitled Afghan-American and go around backslapping people, pretending I'm one of them, full of bonhomie. That's disingenuous. I wasn't here when those guys were getting blown to pieces, so I'm not going to act like I was now that things are better.
And Hosseini, of course, isn't really an average Afghan-American but a celebrity. Sales of The Kite Runner began snowballing when the book came out in paperback, and it spent weeks on the US bestsellers list. In it was made into a film ; the movie adaptation of A Thousand Splendid Suns is due in In the past decade he has enjoyed several moments of disbelief.
The first, he recalls, came on a flight when he realised the woman beside him was reading The Kite Runner. And I couldn't believe it. I didn't do anything, and she never said anything, but I noticed that she was really into it. The second time: "I was watching TV and I flipped the channels just in time to catch myself as the answer to a Jeopardy!
So that was like: OK, people are reading my book. But even while patients of his were coming in just to have their copies signed, he continued to work at the clinic for a year and a half. How long did it take him to think of himself as a writer? And even now I'm a little …" he trails off, with a quiet laugh.
I can't take it seriously. It's just like, oh get over yourself, you know? That kind of humility has no doubt helped his status as book-club favourite — particularly, it seems, among women. That said, I'm always thrilled and feel a great sense of pride when I see a year-old varsity wrestler at a high school and he says, 'Man, I love your book and I wanna read more!
I ask him what is the most common thing fans tell him. I'm touched, but I don't want to be the guy that writes these books that make people cry. It presupposes a kind of calculated effort to extract a specific emotion out of the reader and that's not the way I work. Everything that happens happens because I feel it, you know? Whatever the readers feel when they're reading my books, I feel it tenfold when I'm writing it. I ask him whether the knowledge of such an enormous readership wanting more of the same ever feels suffocating.
The only fear that I have is what if that goes away … I do live with the very real possibility that we don't have endless stories to tell. Family, though, seems to be fruitful territory for him. You are part of something bigger than yourself.
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