The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner of Khaled Hosseini's deeply moving fiction debut is an illiterate Afghan boy with an uncanny instinct for predicting exactly where a downed kite will land. Growing up in the city of Kabul in the early 1970s, Hassan was narrator Amir's closest friend even though the loyal 11-year-old with "a face like a Chinese doll" was the son of Amir's father's servant and a member of Afghanistan's despised Hazara minority. But in 1975, on the day of Kabul's annual kite-fighting tournament, something unspeakable happened between the two boys.

Narrated by Amir, a 40-year-old novelist living in California, The Kite Runner tells the gripping story of a boyhood friendship destroyed by jealousy, fear, and the kind of ruthless evil that transcends mere politics. Running parallel to this personal narrative of loss and redemption is the story of modern Afghanistan and of Amir's equally guilt-ridden relationship with the war-torn city of his birth. The first Afghan novel to be written in English, The Kite Runner begins in the final days of King Zahir Shah's 40-year reign and traces the country's fall from a secluded oasis to a tank-strewn battlefield controlled by the Russians and then the trigger-happy Taliban. When Amir returns to Kabul to rescue Hassan's orphaned child, the personal and the political get tangled together in a plot that is as suspenseful as it is taut with feeling.

The son of an Afghan diplomat whose family received political asylum in the United States in 1980, Hosseini combines the unflinching realism of a war correspondent with the satisfying emotional pull of master storytellers such as Rohinton Mistry. Like the kite that is its central image, the story line of this mesmerizing first novel occasionally dips and seems almost to dive to the ground. But Hosseini ultimately keeps everything airborne until his heartrending conclusion in an American picnic park. --Lisa Alward, Amazon.ca

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Stunning - Rated
I resisted watching the TV film of this because I had bought the book and wanted to read it first. I am glad I did.

The Kite Runner is a stunning story that has such detail it reads at times like an Autobiography. The author describes Afghanistan in such a way that it seems somehow closer than it was before.

This story, of friendship, family, love and shame is so touching and very real, you will find yourself laughing, and crying within paragraphs of each other.

This rates up there with my top ten books, I think a few people will be getting 'The Kite Runner' for a Birthday present this year!

read it, you`ll love it - Rated
This book is so well written that even if you are not concerned with what`s going on in Afghanistan, you will still love the poetic writing of this author, and the story.

I read `A Thousand Splendid Suns` first, if you haven`t read that and you like this book.. go and buy it.

The history of Afghanistan, so well brought to life in these books are worth reading just for that, but also the human suffering and the sort of life they have is a lesson I found very enlightening.

Out of character - Rated
I like good moral characters and either happily ever after endings or deserved come uppences. I frequently don't finish books where events or people are too nasty for me and where I think the villian won't be punished even though not finishing a book leaves me feeling hollow, and I thought this was going to go on that pile.
But it didn't, I don't know why I carried on reading it as the story is certainly nasty enough. I think the author kept me reading past the point I would have given up because at the point I would have abbandoned it the story moved forward to a new time a new place- I could only hope that the main character would change or get caught. I enjoyed this book but- I may have enjoyed it in spite of myself I think I may re examine my unfinished pile.

interesting... - Rated
Enjoyed reading this book, it was an insight into a world that I know nothing about.

The only book to ever make me cry.. - Rated
I had decided that I didn't want to read this book - I'd been so easily led before to read something that everyone else had read and raved about and been deeply disappointed - not this time. I thought the story was beautifully told, poignant and from the perspective of a child who acted with cowardice through to the man consumed with guilt, I was gripped.