Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1164 in Books
• Published on: 2007-12-17
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
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

Review
'Marvellous' Joanna Trollope 'Powerful and involving' Time Out 'The most exquisitely told story of the sad and turbulent recent history of Afghanistan' Penny Smith 'It's remarkable. It's like a condensed history of Afghanistan, mixed with a Shakespearean tale of friendship and love brilliant' Ben Fogle, Daily Express

Literary Review
'Beautifully nuanced, and the moment of Amir's ultimate betrayal is genuinely shocking. It is a passionate story'

Customer Reviews

Moving
This book is so powerful and moving, one can only be moved by the storyline of Hassan and Amir and what trauma's both of these character's endured, will keep you entapped until the end.

Top read
Has to rate as one of the best novels I have ever read. Couldn't put it down. Would be a perfect book for discussion at a book club. The story twists and turns, just like the kites - I plan to buy DVD, let's hope it doesn't disappoint.

Un-putdownable
I loved this book. Thought provoking and informative, it gives an insight into a world most of us can only guess at, at times disturbing, at times hopeful but always engaging, and portrays the best and worst of mankind's nature - betrayal for self-interest, cruelty, denial and then loyalty in the face of deceit and great compassion. The characters remain true to their social background and personal ambitions throughout and their individual fate is realistic. Wonderful. A book with so much to say that it can be read more than once.