Reading List

Authors Like Khaled Hosseini

Q: What should I read after A Thousand Splendid Suns?

Nadia Hashimi's The Pearl That Broke Its Shell is the nearest: Afghan women, forced marriage and a century of history. After that, Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, two half-sisters whose lives split into two family lines, and Elif Shafak's The Bastard of Istanbul, two families bound by a secret.

Khaled Hosseini was eleven when his family moved from Kabul to Paris in 1976 with his father's diplomatic work, and fifteen when, after the Soviet invasion, they were granted political asylum in the United States and settled in San Jose. He trained as a doctor and was still practising internal medicine in California when The Kite Runner came out in 2003. It spent 101 weeks on the New York Times list and was the best-selling novel of 2005 in America. Three novels in, the pattern is clear: a family, a country breaking apart around it, and a debt — between two boys, two wives, a brother and a sister — that takes decades to pay. The writers below share that mix of the intimate and the historical, and most of them share the plain, generous storytelling that made people who do not usually read literary fiction read his.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Family sagas · Exile · Afghanistan and beyond · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Khaled Hosseini, start with Nadia Hashimi — an Afghan-American doctor writing Afghan women across generations, the closest thing to A Thousand Splendid Suns. For Afghanistan told from inside, read Atiq Rahimi. For the big family saga with history pressing on every page, Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun. And if And the Mountains Echoed was your favourite, Min Jin Lee's Pachinko.

10 authors like Khaled Hosseini

Afghan women · Closest match

Nadia Hashimi

Afghan-American · The Pearl That Broke Its Shell (2014), A House Without Windows (2016)

Hashimi was born in New York in 1977 to Afghan parents who had come to the United States in the early 1970s and could not go back after the Soviet invasion. She is a paediatrician and wrote her novels alongside emergency-room work. The Pearl That Broke Its Shell braids together two Afghan women a century apart through the custom of bacha posh, girls dressed and raised as boys.

The most direct line from A Thousand Splendid Suns: Afghan women, marriages they did not choose, and a history that keeps closing doors on them. Like Hosseini she is a doctor, the child of Afghan émigrés, writing in English for readers who have never been to Kabul, and like him she is generous with plot. Read her when you want that book again.

— Lisanne

Afghanistan from the inside

Atiq Rahimi

Afghan-French · Earth and Ashes (2000), The Patience Stone (2008)

Rahimi left Kabul after the Soviet invasion, spent a year in Pakistan and was given asylum in France in 1985. Earth and Ashes, written in Dari, is an old man and his grandson waiting at a checkpoint to tell a miner that his village has been destroyed. The Patience Stone, his first book in French, won the Prix Goncourt in 2008: a woman talking to her comatose husband, saying everything she never could.

The opposite temperament to Hosseini — short, spare, almost theatrical — and the useful corrective. Hosseini's Afghanistan is often seen on an émigré's return; Rahimi's never leaves the room. If A Thousand Splendid Suns made you want to hear what Mariam could not say out loud, The Patience Stone is that, sentence by sentence. He filmed both books himself.

— Lisanne

The big humane saga

Rohinton Mistry

Indian-Canadian · Such a Long Journey (1991), A Fine Balance (1995)

Mistry was born in Bombay in 1952, emigrated to Canada in 1975 and worked in a bank in Toronto before he wrote fiction. A Fine Balance follows four strangers pushed into one Bombay flat during Indira Gandhi's Emergency of 1975–77. It won the Giller Prize and was a Booker finalist, as Such a Long Journey had been before it.

If what kept you reading was the way history lands on ordinary people — the Soviets in Amir's Kabul, the Taliban in Mariam's street — this is the book that does it at the greatest length and with the most tenderness. It will also hurt the most. Like Hosseini, Mistry writes friendship across class as the thing politics is built to break.

— Lisanne

All of Rohinton Mistry's books, in order, and where I'd start →

War through one household

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Nigerian · Purple Hibiscus (2003), Half of a Yellow Sun (2006)

Half of a Yellow Sun is the Biafran war of 1967–70 seen from a university lecturer's house in Nsukka: twin sisters, their lovers, and a houseboy, Ugwu, who turns out to be the book's conscience. It won the Orange Prize in 2007. Purple Hibiscus is the shorter way in: a teenage girl and a father admired in public and feared at home.

The same architecture as The Kite Runner — a comfortable household, a servant whose loyalty is tested, and a war that shows what each owed the other. Adichie is the more political writer and the cooler one, but the emotional payoff is just as large.

— Lisanne

All of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's books, in order, and where I'd start →

The secret a family keeps

Elif Shafak

Turkish-British · The Bastard of Istanbul (2006), The Island of Missing Trees (2021)

Shafak writes in Turkish and English. In 2006 she was prosecuted under Article 301 for “insulting Turkishness” over words spoken by characters in The Bastard of Istanbul, a novel about an Armenian-American family and a Turkish one bound by what happened in 1915; she was acquitted. The Island of Missing Trees tells divided Cyprus partly through a fig tree.

Hosseini's other great subject is the secret a family keeps for a generation — who Hassan really was, what happened to Pari. Shafak builds whole novels on that mechanism, in places where a nation's silence and a family's are the same silence. 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World was shortlisted for the Booker in 2019.

— Lisanne

All of Elif Shafak's books, in order, and where I'd start →

Four generations, one family

Min Jin Lee

Korean-American · Free Food for Millionaires (2007), Pachinko (2017)

Pachinko begins in a fishing village in Japanese-occupied Korea and follows Sunja and her descendants to Osaka and through most of the twentieth century, as Koreans in Japan who are never allowed to belong. It was a National Book Award finalist in 2017.

And the Mountains Echoed is the Hosseini novel this resembles: a family scattered over sixty years and several countries, held together by one early decision. Pachinko does it with more patience and a larger cast. It is the book to hand someone who has read all of Hosseini and asks what next.

— Lisanne

All of Min Jin Lee's books, in order, and where I'd start →

The other doctor-novelist

Abraham Verghese

Ethiopian-born Indian-American · Cutting for Stone (2009), The Covenant of Water (2023)

Verghese was born in Addis Ababa to Indian parents from Kerala and is a physician and professor of medicine at Stanford. Cutting for Stone follows twin brothers born at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa, through the Ethiopian revolution, to America. The Covenant of Water goes back three generations in Kerala and was an Oprah's Book Club pick in 2023.

The closest match in sensibility: another doctor writing sweeping, plot-generous novels about brothers, betrayal and exile, with a homeland seen from abroad after a revolution. Cutting for Stone has the Kite Runner arc — a boy, a wrong done, a long road back — and the same emotional directness most literary novelists avoid.

— Lisanne

All of Abraham Verghese's books, in order, and where I'd start →

Afghanistan in the wider story

Kamila Shamsie

Pakistani-British · Burnt Shadows (2009), Home Fire (2017)

Burnt Shadows runs from Nagasaki in 1945 through Delhi at Partition and Karachi to Afghanistan and New York after 2001. Home Fire retells Antigone through a British Pakistani family whose brother joins ISIS; it won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2018.

If part of Hosseini's appeal was that he made forty years of Afghan history readable, Shamsie does the same for the region's wider entanglements, and Burnt Shadows actually goes to Afghanistan. Home Fire is the tighter book and has the more devastating ending.

— Lisanne

A family split at the root

Yaa Gyasi

Ghanaian-American · Homegoing (2016), Transcendent Kingdom (2020)

Homegoing begins with two half-sisters in eighteenth-century Gold Coast: one marries a British slaver at Cape Coast Castle, the other is held in its dungeons and shipped to America. Each chapter follows the next generation of one line or the other, down to the present day.

A Thousand Splendid Suns is two women whose lives become one story; Homegoing is two whose lives become two histories. Gyasi has Hosseini's gift for the chapter that works as a complete story, and the instinct to end on a reunion — earned here over three hundred years.

— Lisanne

All of Yaa Gyasi's books, in order, and where I'd start →

The same grief, more style

Arundhati Roy

Indian · The God of Small Things (1997), The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017)

The God of Small Things is a childhood in Kerala in 1969: twins, a cousin's visit, and one transgression across caste that the whole family punishes. It won the Booker Prize in 1997. Roy then spent twenty years on essays and activism before her second novel.

Roy and Hosseini share a subject — children who witness a betrayal they are too young to stop and spend their adult lives circling it — and almost nothing else. Her prose is dense, playful and out of order where his is plain. Read her when you want the feeling of The Kite Runner from a writer who makes you work for it.

— Lisanne

All of Arundhati Roy's books, in order, and where I'd start →

Where to start if you loved Khaled Hosseini

If you want A Thousand Splendid Suns again, read Nadia Hashimi.

The Pearl That Broke Its Shell first: two Afghan women, a century apart, one custom.

If you want Afghanistan from the inside, read Atiq Rahimi.

The Patience Stone takes an evening and won the Goncourt.

If you want the biggest emotional saga, read Rohinton Mistry.

A Fine Balance. Clear a week, and keep tissues nearby.

If And the Mountains Echoed was your favourite, read Min Jin Lee.

Pachinko: one family across most of a century.

If you liked that he was a doctor, read Abraham Verghese.

Cutting for Stone: twins, a mission hospital, a debt between brothers.

If you want books rather than authors

My list of books like The Kite Runner goes title by title.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Khaled Hosseini

Who should I read if I love Khaled Hosseini?

Nadia Hashimi first — an Afghan-American doctor whose novels about Afghan women are the closest match to A Thousand Splendid Suns. Atiq Rahimi writes Afghanistan from inside, in a much sparer style. For the family saga under political violence, read Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun; for a family across generations and countries, Min Jin Lee's Pachinko.

What should I read after The Kite Runner?

For the same story of friendship, guilt and atonement, Abraham Verghese's Cutting for Stone and Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun. For more Afghanistan, Nadia Hashimi and Atiq Rahimi. There is a title-by-title list on my page of books like The Kite Runner.

What should I read after A Thousand Splendid Suns?

Nadia Hashimi's The Pearl That Broke Its Shell is the nearest: Afghan women, forced marriage and a century of history. After that, Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, two half-sisters whose lives split into two family lines, and Elif Shafak's The Bastard of Istanbul, two families bound by a secret.

Are there Afghan authors like Khaled Hosseini?

Yes. Nadia Hashimi was born in New York to Afghan parents and writes in English, much as Hosseini does. Atiq Rahimi was born in Kabul in 1962, left after the Soviet invasion and writes in Dari and French; The Patience Stone won the Prix Goncourt in 2008.

In what order should I read Khaled Hosseini's books?

His novels are not connected, so any order works. In publication order: The Kite Runner (2003), A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007), And the Mountains Echoed (2013), and the short illustrated book Sea Prayer (2018). Each one is covered on my Khaled Hosseini author guide.

Was Khaled Hosseini a doctor?

Yes. He earned his medical degree at the University of California, San Diego in 1993, completed his residency in internal medicine at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles in 1997, and practised in California for more than ten years. He gave up medicine to write full-time after The Kite Runner succeeded. He is also a Goodwill Envoy for the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, and set up the Khaled Hosseini Foundation to support Afghan refugees.

Sources

List last reviewed 13 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

Authors Like Khaled Hosseini

10 authors like Khaled Hosseini

Nadia Hashimi

Atiq Rahimi

Rohinton Mistry

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Elif Shafak

Min Jin Lee

Abraham Verghese

Kamila Shamsie

Yaa Gyasi

Arundhati Roy

Where to start if you loved Khaled Hosseini

Frequently asked questions about authors like Khaled Hosseini

Who should I read if I love Khaled Hosseini?

What should I read after The Kite Runner?

What should I read after A Thousand Splendid Suns?

Are there Afghan authors like Khaled Hosseini?

In what order should I read Khaled Hosseini's books?

Was Khaled Hosseini a doctor?

Hi, there.

Home

About

My Bookshelf

Weekly’s

Stay tuned: sign up for the newsletter!