Product Description

Taking us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy to the present, The Kite Runner is the unforgettable and beautifully told story of the friendship between two boys growing up in Kabul. Raised in the same household and sharing the same wet nurse, Amir and Hassan grow up in different worlds: Amir is the son of a prominent and wealthy man, while Hassan, the son of Amir's father's servant, is a Hazara -- a shunned ethnic minority. Their intertwined lives, and their fates, reflect the eventual tragedy of the world around them. When Amir and his father flee the country for a new life in California, Amir thinks that he has escaped his past. And yet he cannot leave the memory of Hassan behind him.

The Kite Runner is a novel about friendship and betrayal, and about the price of loyalty. It is about the bonds between fathers and sons, and the power of fathers over sons -- their love, their sacrifices, and their lies. Written against a backdrop of history that has not been told in fiction before, The Kite Runner describes the rich culture and beauty of a land in the process of being destroyed. But through the devastation, Khaled Hosseini offers hope: through the novel's faith in the power of reading and storytelling, and in the possibilities he shows us for redemption.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #58827 in Books
• Published on: 2003-06-01
• Formats: Abridged, Audiobook
• Original language: English
• Binding: Audio CD

Amazon.ca
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 as 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

From Publishers Weekly
Hosseini's stunning debut novel starts as an eloquent Afghan version of the American immigrant experience in the late 20th century, but betrayal and redemption come to the forefront when the narrator, a writer, returns to his ravaged homeland to rescue the son of his childhood friend after the boy's parents are shot during the Taliban takeover in the mid '90s. Amir, the son of a well-to-do Kabul merchant, is the first-person narrator, who marries, moves to California and becomes a successful novelist. But he remains haunted by a childhood incident in which he betrayed the trust of his best friend, a Hazara boy named Hassan, who receives a brutal beating from some local bullies. After establishing himself in America, Amir learns that the Taliban have murdered Hassan and his wife, raising questions about the fate of his son, Sohrab. Spurred on by childhood guilt, Amir makes the difficult journey to Kabul, only to learn the boy has been enslaved by a former childhood bully who has become a prominent Taliban official. The price Amir must pay to recover the boy is just one of several brilliant, startling plot twists that make this book memorable both as a political chronicle and a deeply personal tale about how childhood choices affect our adult lives. The character studies alone would make this a noteworthy debut, from the portrait of the sensitive, insecure Amir to the multilayered development of his father, Baba, whose sacrifices and scandalous behavior are fully revealed only when Amir returns to Afghanistan and learns the true nature of his relationship to Hassan. Add an incisive, perceptive examination of recent Afghan history and its ramifications in both America and the Middle East, and the result is a complete work of literature that succeeds in exploring the culture of a previously obscure nation that has become a pivot point in the global politics of the new millennium.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-This beautifully written first novel presents a glimpse of life in Afghanistan before the Russian invasion and introduces richly drawn, memorable characters. Quiet, intellectual Amir craves the attention of his father, a wealthy Kabul businessman. Kind and self-confident Hassan is the son of Amir's father's servant. The motherless boys play together daily, and when Amir wins the annual kite contest, Hassan offers to track down the opponent's runaway kite as a prize. When he finds it, the neighborhood bullies trap and rape him, as Amir stands by too terrified to help. Their lives and their friendship are forever changed, and the memory of his cowardice haunts Amir as he grows into manhood. Hassan and his father return to the village of their ancestors, and later Amir and his father flee to Los Angeles to avoid political persecution. Amir attends college, marries, and fulfills his dream of becoming a writer. When Amir receives word of his former friend's death under the Taliban, he returns to Kabul to learn the fate of Hassan's son. This gripping story of personal redemption will capture readers' interest.
Penny Stevens, Andover College, Portland, ME
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Life is not a coincidence
THE KITE RUNNER is one of the few books that I've bought several copies of---just to give away to friends. It is truly a harrowing yet touching tale. Recreating the day-to-day existence of Amir and his father (Baba), a successful merchant in Kabul in the 1970's, Hosseini creates a warm and emotionally involving story of childhood, its traumas, and the importance of family in THE KITE RUNNER. Telling of two families--Amir and his father, and Hassan and Ali, their servants--he depicts two different worlds. Amir and Baba are Pashtuns, while Hassan and Ali are Hazaras, descendants of the Moguls who are also Shi'a Muslims, and it is in these parallel tracks that we come to see the variety of life in Afghanistan, its mores, traditions, and its hierarchies. Best friends, the boys grow up together, though Hassan, the servant, bears the burden of being different in appearance, both because of his Mogul heritage and because of his unrepaired hair-lip. When the boys are twelve, Hassan is beaten and severely injured by bullies, while Amir, who witnesses the attack, runs away in fear. Burdened by guilt and jealous of the close relationship between his father and Hassan and Ali, Amir manipulates their dismissal. Six years later, after a Communist coup, Amir and his father escape to the United States, where, away from the roles demanded of them in Kabul, they are on a more equal footing and come to new understandings. When Amir gets a phone call from his father's former business partner, twenty years later, he returns to Afghanistan to put his betrayal of Hassan to rights and "be good again." THE KITE RUNNER is a lesson in how we're all connected, or can be if we only look. Must also highly recommend the book BARK OF THE DOGWOOD which is just as well written and compelling. Good stuff, these books.

Run with it
I don't want to tell too much and ruin this book for anyone. It's such a moving book, emotional and reads so biographical as you feel this MUST have happened to SOMEONE and it has, many times over. Amir must deal with the changing face of Afghanistan as he works on this mission, he must face the Taliban and make right what he as a child did wrong.

The ending is NOT predictable and it's not happily ever after. It's a bittersweet, realistic ending that leaves one wanting to know more. I know I did. I realized too, in shame, how little I really knew about Afghanistan. How little they taught us in school and I understand so much more now, yet I know not enough. There's a huge cultural divide out there and this book, while fiction, helps bridge that gap for a few hundred pages. This is a first novel for Khaled Hosseini but it certainly does NOT read like one. It's moving and graphic and disturbing in all the right parts, oddly enough. It made me think and sob with what humans are capable of doing for one another and to one another on many fronts, both personal and societal.

Fly away
THE KITE RUNNER is written with such startling realism that I can't help but think it is largely autobiographical. The settings of both Amir's childhood in Kabul and his adult life in the Bay Area are lovingly written with such clarity that I almost believe that I could go over the hill to Fremont and meet the very people described in the book. Books like this one are the entire reason I read. Hundreds of books can be read and enjoyed but then you stumble across one like THE KITE RUNNER and you don't want it to end and the next bunch of books you read pale in comparison. THE KITE RUNNER is a beautiful story, beautifully written. While reading it is difficult not to sit and weep for Afghanistan and her people. I cannot recommend this wonderful book highly enough. It is one of the best novels I have read so far this year. The only other book that came close was THE BARK OF THE DOGWOOD and that one has many funny elements to it. The writing style of "RUNNER" is sparse and simple, yet it packs an emotional wallop. I could smell the kabobs sizzling on the grill, see the kites soaring and battling in the crisp winter sky, and feel the despair of the Afghani people over the loss of their old way of life due to war and oppression. The story is almost allegorical in its universal truths of love, friendship, betrayal, and redemption. Not only does it bring to life the turmoil and hardships that Afghanistan has faced, but also it sheds light on the culture and nature of the people behind the news stories.