Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8 in Books
• Published on: 2004-06-07
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 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

Joanna Trollope, Books of the Year, The Observer
'My top fiction book of the year ... marvellous'

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

Customer Reviews

Moved me to tears
Such a thought-provoking, yet enjoyable story with great insights into life in Kabul before the Russians invaded and also after when the Taliban took hold. The characters and the events that unfolded in this book will not be easily forgotten by myself and I cried at a couple of points in the story - something I very rarely do at literature. I hope you will love this book too.

Moving
This book is on my bookshelf and will without doubt be picked up and read again it was hard to find a book as good as this after id read it

Brotherhood and Redemption
I fell in love with Khaled Hosseini's novel `THE KITE RUNNER'; the story is sad, beautiful and inspiring. The writer relates the story in a way that makes you feel like it's poetry.

This is a story of unconditional love, brotherhood and redemption set in Afghanistan.

Two young boys, Amir and Hassan are best friends living in a household where Amir is the son of the rich owner of the house and the Hassan is the son of the house keeper; the class differences become an important factor in the story. The boys appear to have an inseparable friendship, reading stories together and flying kites.

An event occurs in which Amir's strength of character and loyalty is tested. His actions, or lack there-of, will severely affect his and Hassan's life and they will never be the same again. Amir will be haunted with guilt because of the consequences of that fateful day for the rest of his life.

As a man, many years later, Amir discovers that there is hope, redemption is possible: `there is a way to be good again'.