Khaled Hosseini Plans New Novel Next May

Riverhead Books said Monday that it would publish a new novel next year by Khaled Hosseini, the author of the international bestseller “The Kite Runner.”

The novel, Mr. Hosseini's first in six years, is titled “And The Mountains Echoed” and will be released in May. Like his earlier books - ” The Kite Runner” and “A Thousand Splendid Suns” - the book will return to the theme of family relations.

“My earlier novels were, at heart, tales of fatherhood and motherhood,” Mr. Hosseini said in a statement released by Riverhead, a division of Penguin. “My new novel is a multigenerational-family story as well, this time revolving around brothers and sisters, and the ways in which they love, wound, betray, honor, and sacrifice for each other.”

When the Kite Runner was published in 2003, Mr. Hosseini was an unknown author, but word of the powerful tale of sacrifice in Afghanistan spread quickly among readers, and the book spent 103 weeks on t he New York Times Bestseller List and was adapted to film in 2007.