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Wrenching Tale by an Afghan Immigrant Strikes a Chord

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By Edward Wyatt

• Dec. 15, 2004

PALM BEACH, Fla. - Few aspects of this swank oceanside resort call to mind the harsh grind of daily life in Kabul, Afghanistan. Yet when a local book group met here recently to discuss "The Kite Runner," the stunningly successful first novel by an Afghan immigrant, many group members said they felt they were reading pages out of their own lives.

To Esta Jacobson, the book's descriptions of a boy's decision to run from the bullies who were tormenting his friend evoked memories of growing up in South Africa and silently watching harassment of blacks in the streets.

To Yvonne Campbell, the arbitrary violence of the Taliban reminded her of the deportation of her parents and neighbors in Toulouse to Nazi concentration camps. And Nancy Hertzberg said the rigid caste system in the novel recalled the interactions of her condominium neighbors with their Guatemalan gardeners.

"The Kite Runner," by Khaled Hosseini, a previously unknown son of an Afghan political refugee, has captivated reading groups across the country with its rich mix of familiar morality tale and timely world history. Without any significant national publicity -- no recommendation by Oprah Winfrey or a morning television show, no superstar author backed by a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign -- the book has steadily climbed the best-seller lists, rising as high as No.5 on the paperback best-seller list of The New York Times and selling more than 500,000 copies in seven months, a significant achievement for a literary novel.

It has done so thanks to the word-of-mouth recommendations of librarians and book sellers and on the strength of local book clubs, like the one here in Palm Beach, as well as community reading programs, where one book is chosen by a city or region, like eastern Connecticut or the central California valley.

The popularity of "The Kite Runner," the tale of the friendship of two Afghan boys and how one's betrayal of the other affects their adult lives in Kabul and California, is all the more unusual in an age when relatively few novels set outside the English-speaking world register much American success. Even after Sept. 11, Afghanistan remains an obscure if not inscrutable place to many Americans, and the book's unsympathetic protagonist and lack of any significant female characters only make it feel more foreign.

People who have read the book, however, speak almost exclusively of how they were touched by its universal themes. "There are so many basic human emotions at work here," said John Tegano, a member of the Palm Beach group.

The book's success validates the decision by Riverhead Books, the publisher, to pay a surprisingly large advance of $500,000 for the manuscript, even knowing that it would require significant rewriting. But part of the attraction was that the life story of the author, Mr. Hosseini, 39, could itself be the source of a best seller.

The son of an Afghan diplomat and a mother who taught high school in Kabul, Mr. Hosseini grew up in Kabul, Tehran and Paris, where his father was stationed when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1980. The family was granted political asylum in the United States and moved to San Jose, Calif., in September of that year.

Arriving in the United States at age 15, Mr. Hosseini learned English only after starting high school in California. His family, which enjoyed significant wealth in Afghanistan, spent its initial months there on welfare. After Mr. Hosseini graduated from Santa Clara University and earned a medical degree from the University of California, San Diego, he served a residency at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. A semi-arranged marriage to another Afghan immigrant followed, and he began practicing in internal medicine at a Kaiser Permanente office in Silicon Valley.

It was only after spending several years as a physician that Mr. Hosseini began to write, rising at 5 a.m. each day to sketch out short stories and, much later, his novel, before going to work. A half-dozen stories, mainly thrillers or gothic horror tales, were published online or in experimental zines. But submissions to The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire and other mainstream publications brought nothing but rejections.

One short story, however -- a tale of a young Afghan boy and the son of the family servant, whose pastimes included the ancient Afghan sport of kite flying -- caught the attention of a fan. "My wife had passed a copy to my father-in-law," Mr. Hosseini said in an interview. "He called me and left a message saying he wished the story had been a lot longer. He wanted to know what happened to Amir and Hassan."

The story of Amir, the son of a rug exporter, and his friend Hassan stretches across several decades of Afghan history, from the monarchy of Mohammad Zahir Shah, through the bloodless coup in 1973, the Communist takeover in 1978, the Soviet invasion in 1979 and the reign of the Taliban, ending after the American invasion following Sept. 11, 2001.

As first drafted, the novel was far from perfect, but it drew the attention of several New York editors, including Cindy Spiegel, co-publisher of Riverhead, a division of the Penguin Group USA.

"The truth is it needed work," Ms. Spiegel said. "I think that is why other people were less bullish. The last third of the book had to be rewritten."

The main problem, Ms. Spiegel said and Mr. Hosseini confirmed, was that Amir, after escaping Afghanistan and fleeing to Fremont, Calif., married an American woman. The character was unbelievable -- not surprising, perhaps, for a writer who had not grown up in the United States and who had married an Afghan woman whom he had only met once. Mr. Hosseini agreed to make Amir's wife an Afghan immigrant, a change that required the overhaul of the second half of the book. Published in June 2003, "The Kite Runner" received generally good reviews. Thanks to heavy promotion by the Penguin sales force, it received the endorsements of Book Sense, the consortium of independent bookstores, which put the book on its list of 76 new and noteworthy books. In February, Borders named "The Kite Runner" as the 2003 fiction winner of its Original Voices Awards, giving the book prominent display in its stores.

But except for brisk sales in the San Francisco area, where the local papers gave considerable attention to the new author, sales of "The Kite Runner" in hardcover did not measure up to the author's advance, measuring about 50,000 copies in the first year.

When the paperback edition came out in May, however, sales began to climb. That month, the book was named as the selection of the One Book, One Region program of Eastern Connecticut, sponsored by the Connecticut Library Consortium and other educators and community groups.

At least a dozen other community book groups followed, including those in Woodland, Calif.; Johnson County, Iowa; Saratoga Springs, N.Y.; and Cincinnati. More still have selected the book for reading programs in 2005, including Rhode Island's statewide program, the Las Vegas Literary Society and the community of Pittsboro, N.C. The book has also been adopted for courses at Penn State, the University of Northern Colorado, the University of Iowa and James Madison University.

"The community groups have been very instrumental in the success of this book," Mr. Hosseini said . "When I was in Connecticut, several people came up to me and said this is not a book they would have picked up if not for this program."

"The Kite Runner" finally made it onto The Times paperback best-seller list in September, beginning at No.13 and climbing steadily over the past 12 weeks. (On Sunday's list, the book will rank No.7.)

Mr. Hosseini has been tireless in promoting the book, logging more than 100 appearances, giving readings, signing books and discussing the novel -- all the while continuing to work full-time as a Kaiser physician. Only this month did he begin a yearlong sabbatical. Ms. Spiegel, the book's editor, said that based on the reading programs already scheduled for next year, she expects the book to continue to sell well for a year or two.

The reactions of the Palm Beach group suggest that will happen. "I recognized so many things that happened in my time," Ms. Campbell said, referring to the years she spent living in a French convent, a Jewish girl hidden away by the nuns as her parents and dozens of neighbors were deported by the Nazis. "What struck me about the characters here is that they're all very human."

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THE KITE RUNNER

by Khaled Hosseini ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 2, 2003

Rather than settle for a coming-of-age or travails-of-immigrants story, Hosseini has folded them both into this searing...

Here’s a real find: a striking debut from an Afghan now living in the US. His passionate story of betrayal and redemption is framed by Afghanistan’s tragic recent past.

Moving back and forth between Afghanistan and California, and spanning almost 40 years, the story begins in Afghanistan in the tranquil 1960s. Our protagonist Amir is a child in Kabul. The most important people in his life are Baba and Hassan. Father Baba is a wealthy Pashtun merchant, a larger-than-life figure, fretting over his bookish weakling of a son (the mother died giving birth); Hassan is his sweet-natured playmate, son of their servant Ali and a Hazara. Pashtuns have always dominated and ridiculed Hazaras, so Amir can’t help teasing Hassan, even though the Hazara staunchly defends him against neighborhood bullies like the “sociopath” Assef. The day, in 1975, when 12-year-old Amir wins the annual kite-fighting tournament is the best and worst of his young life. He bonds with Baba at last but deserts Hassan when the latter is raped by Assef. And it gets worse. With the still-loyal Hassan a constant reminder of his guilt, Amir makes life impossible for him and Ali, ultimately forcing them to leave town. Fast forward to the Russian occupation, flight to America, life in the Afghan exile community in the Bay Area. Amir becomes a writer and marries a beautiful Afghan; Baba dies of cancer. Then, in 2001, the past comes roaring back. Rahim, Baba’s old business partner who knows all about Amir’s transgressions, calls from Pakistan. Hassan has been executed by the Taliban; his son, Sohrab, must be rescued. Will Amir wipe the slate clean? So he returns to the hell of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and reclaims Sohrab from a Taliban leader (none other than Assef) after a terrifying showdown. Amir brings the traumatized child back to California and a bittersweet ending.

Pub Date: June 2, 2003

ISBN: 1-57322-245-3

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Riverhead

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003

LITERARY FICTION

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by Khaled Hosseini ; illustrated by Dan Williams

by Khaled Hosseini

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SEEN & HEARD

THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2019

New York Times Bestseller

IndieBound Bestseller

NORMAL PEOPLE

by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!

Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends , in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.

Pub Date: April 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

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by Sally Rooney

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KHALED HOSSEINI

The kite runner.

Overview The New York Times bestseller and international classic loved by millions of readers. The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons—their love, their sacrifices, their lies. A sweeping story of family, love, and friendship told against the devastating backdrop of the history of Afghanistan over the last thirty years, The Kite Runner is an unusual and powerful novel that has become a beloved, one-of-a-kind classic. Excerpt Discussion Questions

“An astonishing, powerful book.” — Diane Sawyer

“This powerful first novel, by an Afghan physician now living in California, tells a story of fierce cruelty and fierce yet redeeming love…In  The Kite Runner , Khaled Hosseini gives us a vivid and engaging story that reminds us how long his people have been struggling to triumph over the forces of violence – forces that continue to threaten them even today.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Like  Gone with the Wind , this extraordinary first novel locates the personal struggles of everyday people in the terrible sweep of history.” —People  

“Poignant… The Kite Runner  offers a moving portrait of modern Afghanistan, from its pre-Russian-invasion glory days through the terrible reign of the Taliban.” —Entertainment Weekly  (Grade: A)

“A marvelous first novel… an incredible story of the culture. It’s an old-fashioned kind of novel that really sweeps you away.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“A powerful book…no frills, no nonsense, just hard, spare prose…an intimate account of family and friendship, betrayal and salvation that requires no atlas or translation to engage and enlighten us. Parts of The Kite Runner are raw and excruciating to read, yet the book in its entirety is lovingly written.” —The Washington Post Book World  

“ The Kite Runner , Hosseini’s first novel, is more than just good writing. It is also a wonderfully conjured story that offers a glimpse into an Afghanistan most Americans have never seen, and depicts a side of humanity rarely revealed.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer  

Originally screened in theaters on December 14, 2007 the film, directed by Marc Forster is an adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s novel of the same title, The Kite Runner. The screen adaptation was performed by David Benioff. Set in Afghanistan, the film was mostly shot in Kashgar, China for safety reasons. The majority of the film is in Dari with subtitles or English. In 2007, the film was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film and the film’s score, by Alberto Iglesias, was nominated for Best Original Score at both the Golden Globes and Academy Awards. The DVD was released on March 25, 2008.

Learn more about The Kite Runner Movie

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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, the kite runner.

THE KITE RUNNER, Khaled Hosseini’s debut novel, focuses on the relationship between two Afghan boys --- Amir, the novel’s narrator and the son of a prosperous Kabul businessman, and Hassan, the son of Ali, a servant in the household of Amir’s father. Amir is a Pashtun and Sunni Muslim, while Hassan is a Hazara and a Shi’a. Despite their ethnic and religious differences, Amir and Hassan grow to be friends, although Amir is troubled by Hassan’s subservience, and his relationship with his companion, one year his junior, is ambivalent and complex.

The other source of tension in Amir’s life is his relationship with Baba, his hard-driving and demanding father. Desperate to win his father’s affection and respect, Amir turns to the sport of kite flying, and at the age of 12, with the assistance of Hassan, he wins the annual tournament in Kabul. But Amir’s victory soon is tarnished when he witnesses a vicious assault against his friend, who has raced through the streets of Kabul to retrieve the last kite Amir had sliced from the sky, and fails to come to his aid. Amir’s cowardice is compounded by a later act of betrayal that causes Ali and Hassan to leave their home, and he now faces the nightmare prospect of bearing the burden of his ill-fated choices for the rest of his life.

"Khaled Hosseini’s novel offers a potent combination of a setting in an exotic land that has taken on increasing importance to Americans in the last several years with a compelling human drama."

In 1981, following the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, Amir and Baba flee the country for California, where Amir attends college, marries and becomes a successful novelist. Amir’s world is shaken in 2001 when he receives a call from his father’s best friend, informing him that “There is a way to be good again.” That call launches him on a harrowing journey to rescue Hassan’s son Sohrab, orphaned by the brutal Taliban, and at the same time redeem himself from the torment of his youthful mistakes.

Hosseini, a native of Afghanistan who left the country at the age of 11 and settled in the United States in 1980, does a marvelous job of introducing readers to the people and culture of his homeland. He makes no attempt to romanticize the often harsh reality of life there throughout the last 30 years, though he’s adept at capturing mundane and yet expressive details --- the beauty of a winter morning in Kabul, the sights and smells of the marketplace and the thrill of the kite flying tournament --- that demonstrate his deep affection for his native land.

In the end, what gives THE KITE RUNNER the power that has endeared the novel to millions of readers is the way that it wrestles with themes that have resonated in classical literature since the time of Greek drama --- friendship, betrayal, the relationship between fathers and sons, the quest for redemption and the power of forgiveness. For a first-time novelist, Hosseini demonstrates striking skill at melding a page-turning story with intensely involving characters and conflicts. Those features of this absorbing novel give it a timelessness that transcends the specifics of the tale.

The fact that THE KITE RUNNER has spent more than 120 weeks on the New York Times paperback bestseller list and has sold more than four million copies in the United States is hardly an accident. Khaled Hosseini’s novel offers a potent combination of a setting in an exotic land that has taken on increasing importance to Americans in the last several years with a compelling human drama. If he can continue, as he has again in A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS, to join those elements in his future work, his readers are likely to remain loyal for many works to come.

Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg on April 26, 2004

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

• Publication Date: April 27, 2004
• Genres: Fiction
• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Trade
• ISBN-10: 1594480001
• ISBN-13: 9781594480003

'The Kite Runner' by Khaled Hosseini - Book Review

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The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini is one of the best books I have read in years. This is a page turner with complex characters and situations that will make you think hard about friendship, good and evil, betrayal, and redemption. It is intense and contains some graphic scenes; however, it is not gratuitous. A great book by many measures.

Reading The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

On one level, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini is the story of two boys in Afghanistan and Afghan immigrants in America. It is a story set in a culture that has become of increasing interest to Americans since the September 11, 2001, attacks. It also explores the history of the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. On this level, it provides a good way for people to learn more about Afghan history and culture in the context of the story.

Looking at The Kite Runner as a story about culture, however, misses what the book is really about. This is a novel about humanity. This is a story about friendship, loyalty, cruelty, longing for acceptance, redemption, and survival. The core story could be set in any culture because it deals with issues that are universal.

The Kite Runner looks at how the main character, Amir, deals with a secret in his past and how that secret shaped who he became. It tells of Amir's childhood friendship with Hassan, his relationship with his father and growing up in a privileged place in society. I was drawn in by Amir's voice. I sympathized with him, cheered for him and felt angry with him at different points. Similarly, I became attached to Hassan and his father. The characters became real to me, and it was difficult for me to put the book down and leave their world.

I highly recommend this book, especially for book clubs. For those of you who are not in a reading group, read it and then loan it to a friend. You are going to want to talk about it when you finish.

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Book Review

Book Review: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

Author:  Khaled Hosseini

Publisher: Riverhead Books

Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Drama

First Publication: 2003

Language:  English

Major Characters: Amir, Hassan, Assef, Bába, Sohrab, Soraya, Rahim Khan

Setting Place: Kabul (Afghanistan), Fremont, California (United States), Peshawar (Pakistan)

Theme: Memory and Past, Politics and Society, Betrayal, Redemption, Violence

Narrator: First person limited, from Amir’s point of view

Book Summary: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons—their love, their sacrifices, their lies.

A sweeping story of family, love, and friendship told against the devastating backdrop of the history of Afghanistan over the last thirty years, The Kite Runner is an unusual and powerful novel that has become a beloved, one-of-a-kind classic.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini starts off really great, it does not deteriorate into crap but I want to stress that it starts off really great.

I have never been to Afghanistan before (I imagine very few of us have) but this book paints such a vivid mental image of life in Kabul during the early 70s (before the Soviet deployment of their Army there) that I feel as if I have some kind of first-hand experience. I am not saying it is an accurate picture of the real Kabul at the time, just that the image and the imaginary atmosphere seems very real. Wild horses couldn’t drag me there now, but I imagine back then it was a nice place and time to grow up in (depending on your station in life there I guess).

“For you, a thousand times over”

Amir is the son of a wealthy, influential Afghan father, and he grows up alongside the son of their servant with whom he becomes best friends. The servants who serve their employers for many years tend to live in or near their employer’s home and tend to have kids of their own who grow up along with the boss’s children. The servants’ children often becoming their playmates if not exactly friends; a close friendship would require a more equal status in life. Amir lives in a mansion while Hassan and his crippled father live in a mud hut on the grounds. Hassan is Amir’s servant—has the fire going, has his breakfast ready before school with his school clothes laid out and his shoes polished. Amir is a bookish boy while Hassan is an unschooled Hazara.

“It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime…”

The Hazara are the underclass, and their status is akin to many other societies where wealthy families and servants or slaves share household activities. We follow Amir, Hassan and their families from their traditional childhood in Kabul in the 1970s through to the “liberation” of Afghanistan by the Taliban and then the barbaric behaviour of the Taliban as they take over and set about ethnic cleansing—wiping out the Hazara (leaving them for the dogs to eat!) and terrifying and killing for the fun of it.

As times change in Kabul, the boys change, life changes, and we are taken to the Afghan community in San Francisco, where they keep their customs and traditions in spite of American ignorance about where they’ve come from.

“And that’s the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.”

Khaled Hosseini writes from a heart that remembers its homeland, and remembers it well. While most of us think of Afghanistan as war-torn and weary, obsessive and restrictive, frightening even; Hosseini remembers what it was before all of that came to be. He gives the Afghani people a face, which can be a very powerful thing indeed.

He does not give us a narrator who is likeable, admirable, or sometimes even excusable, but he does give us a narrator who is human, vulnerable, and who suffers for his shortcomings. For some trespasses there is no atonement, only forgiveness.

“it always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place.”

No need for me to recount anything more about this book. Everyone has read it before me and the reviews are myriad. What I will say is that it is an important, heartfelt work of art and I believe it will be causing readers to replenish boxes of tissues far into the future.

Buy Now: Books by Khaled Hosseini

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Reviews and Reception

The new york times book review  :.

“[A] powerful first novel… political events, even as dramatic as the ones that are presented in ‘ The Kite Runner ‘, are only a part of this story. In ‘ The Kite Runner ‘, Khaled Hosseini gives us a vivid and engaging story that reminds us how long his people have been struggling to triumph over the forces of violence—forces that continue to threaten them even today.”  ― Review by Edward Hower , The Servant, The New York Times Read the full review here

“Like ‘ Gone with the Wind ‘, this extraordinary first novel locates the personal struggles of everyday people in the terrible sweep of history.”  —People  

San Francisco Chronicle  :

“A marvelous first novel… an incredible story of the culture. It’s an old-fashioned kind of novel that really sweeps you away.”  —San Francisco Chronicle

Entertainment Weekly  :

“Poignant… ‘ The Kite Runner ‘ offers a moving portrait of modern Afghanistan, from its pre-Russian-invasion glory days through the terrible reign of the Taliban.”  —Entertainment Weekly  (Grade: A)

The Washington Post Book World  :

“A powerful book…no frills, no nonsense, just hard, spare prose…an intimate account of family and friendship, betrayal and salvation that requires no atlas or translation to engage and enlighten us. Parts of ‘ The Kite Runner ‘ are raw and excruciating to read, yet the book in its entirety is lovingly written.”  —The Washington Post Book World

The Philadelphia Inquirer :

“’ The Kite Runner ‘, Hosseini’s first novel, is more than just good writing. It is also a wonderfully conjured story that offers a glimpse into an Afghanistan most Americans have never seen, and depicts a side of humanity rarely revealed.”  —The Philadelphia Inquirer  

Diane Sawyer :

“An astonishing, powerful book.” — Diane Sawyer

More Praise

Since its publication in 2003,  The Kite Runner has become a beloved, one-of-a-kind classic of contemporary literature, touching millions of readers,and launching the career of one of America’s (and Afghanistan’s) most treasured writers.

Some accolades the novel has earned include:

• Chosen as one of the titles for 1 st  World Book Day held in U.S. (2012)
• Book Sense Bestseller List Sensation
• Boeke Prize
• Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award
• ALA Notable Book
• Borders Original Voices Award, 2003
• Entertainment Weekly’s  Best Book, 2003
• San Francisco Chronicle  Best Book of the Year, 2003
• Literature to Life Award
• Paperback – on the bestseller list for over 240 weeks (#1 for 4 of those weeks)

Criticism: 

Although The Kite Runner  has sold millions of copies and inspired a popular film, the book has been met with several challenges since being published in 2003. In 2017, it was the fourth most challenged book, according to the American Library Association. It was mainly challenged for sexual violence, and Islamophobia fueled some challenges, with some literary pundits arguing that the novel would inspire terrorism and promoted Islam. The book also appeared on the top ten lists for 2014 (offensive language, unsuited to age group, violence), 2012 (homosexuality, offensive language, religious viewpoint, sexually explicit), and 2008 (offensive language, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group).

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Danny Burke ’19

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'The Kite Runner' review — stage adaptation of bestselling book is faithful to a fault

In The Kite Runner , kite flying factors in two pivotal scenes. In the first, the actors come out waving gauzy white fabric hanging from springy wire rods, giving the illusion of kites flying in the air. At my performance, one of the kites failed to sufficiently lift off above the actor's head. It hovered slightly, then dipped toward the ground. The actor valiantly tried to pull it up, but the kite refused to take flight, seemingly comfortable bobbing along at shoulder height. This can be a metaphor for the play, which tries to soar beyond its origins as a novel, but remains steadfastly bound by its source material. 

The Kite Runner is based on Khaled Hosseini's bestselling 2003 novel of the same name. It is set in Afghanistan and is about two friends, Amir (Amir Arison) and Hassan (Eric Sirakian). The two are born only a year apart but have vastly different lives: Amir is rich and educated, Hassan is poor and illiterate; Amir is the master, Hassan is the servant; Amir is Pashtun, the dominant ethnic group in Afghanistan, while Hassan is Hazara, the minority group. Despite their differences, the two are best friends. But when Hassan is raped by a group of Pashtun boys, Amir chooses to runs away instead of helping his friend. That guilt, and his eventual redemption, makes up the bulk of the play and the novel. 

In adapting the story, Matthew Spangler turns The Kite Runner into a memory play: Amir as an adult tells his story to us, the audience, as a flashback. Director Giles Croft (who has directed The Kite Runner in London) has Arison play Amir as a boy and an adult, which means Arison never leaves the stage throughout the play's 2.5-hour running time. Fortunately, Arison is magnetic as Amir, his lanky frame and everyman energy making him an inherently sympathetic narrator (even when Amir does the unforgivable). Arison's voice is deep and rich; you hang onto his every word.

In a novel, you need such a narrator to help you visualize a story from start to finish. The theatre has additional tools: actors, sets, music. Not everything in a play needs to be verbally described to the audience. But instead of utilizing those stage elements, Spangler and Croft overly rely on Hosseini's words. The play doesn't give  The Kite Runner new dimensions, as an adaptation should. Instead, it feels like a CliffsNotes version of the novel. 

The play tells the audience what is happening instead of showing it. In a pivotal kite flying scene, there are no kites onstage. Instead, Arison stands in a kite-flying stance, snapping his body back and forth while describing what is happening. In the background, the ensemble provides swooshing sound effects. By not letting the audience see the kite competition, the narration robs the scene of dramatic tension and an opportunity for dynamic visual storytelling. Instead of being shown the splendor of dozens of kites in the air, battling for dominance, we're told about it. It's a missed opportunity when the only real kite in the play is being sold in the gift shop.

Adaptations can also improve upon the source material. In the original novel, Hassan is less of a fully developed human than a sacrificial lamb that needs to be slaughtered for Amir's personal development. Sirakian, with his round face and bright eyes, is heartbreaking as the innocent Hassan. But he is not given much to do beyond being uncomplicatedly good. Any potential dimension has been cut away. In The Kite Runner novel, after Hassan is raped, Amir describes not seeing him for a week, with Hassan's father, Ali, saying, "Lately, it seems all he wants to do is sleep. He does his chores, but then he just wants to crawl under his blanket." The play cuts that line during an exchange between Ali (Evan Zes) and Amir. So even when Hassan is in pain, that pain is not given space to breathe, and the audience is not invited to sit with that loss of innocence. Instead the stage is immediately filled with more words, more narration, more plot. 

Compared with the surfeit of words, The Kite Runner has a very sparse set: A cityscape backdrop, some hanging curtains for projections, and sloped walkways on either side of the stage that make it look like the play takes place in a skate park instead of Afghanistan. Musician Sala Nader is onstage the entire time, playing the tabla — the sound is the most effective element, giving The Kite Runner a sense of place. 

It is a testament to Hosseini's writing that the story is still compelling, and freshly relevant after America's shameful departure from Afghanistan. The production also manages to find humor in Hosseini's prose. When Arison says, "​​Hassan's mother suffered a fate most Afghans consider far worse than death," he gives a well-placed pause before saying, "She ran off with a troupe of actors and musicians."

Toward the end of the play, Amir kneels down in prayer, his arms out and hands outstretched, repeating in Arabic: "There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger." The stage is dark aside from a single spotlight. In that moment, The Kite Runner is given the rare chance to be still. So much is unspoken in Arison's inflections and body language: his desperation, sadness, and guilt. The moment is haunting in its simplicity. If only The Kite Runner on Broadway depended less on the novel and trusted more on its stagecraft. There might have been more moments like this, of flight and transcendence. 

The Kite Runner  is at the Hayes Theater through October 30. Get  The Kite Runner  tickets on New York Theatre Guide.

Photo credit: Amir Arison and Eric Sirakian in The Kite Runner. (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Originally published on Sep 29, 2022 12:56

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The Kite Runner Paperback – March 5, 2013

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 400 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Riverhead Books
• Publication date March 5, 2013
• Grade level 9 - 12
• Dimensions 5.13 x 1.04 x 8 inches
• ISBN-10 9781594631931
• ISBN-13 978-1594631931
• Lexile measure 840L
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

"A powerful book...no frills, no nonsense, just hard, spare prose...an intimate account of family and friendship, betrayal and salvation that requires no atlas or translation to engage and enlighten us. Parts of The Kite Runner are raw and excruciating to read, yet the book in its entirety is lovingly written." —The Washington Post Book World

"An astonishing, powerful book."—Diane Sawyer

About the Author

Excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved..

KHALED HOSSEINI was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, the son of a diplomat whose family received political asylum in the United States in 1980. He lives in northern California, where he is a physician. The Kite Runner is his first novel.

KHALED HOSSEINI

THE KITE RUNNER

RIVERHEAD BOOKS NEW YORK

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

I am indebted to the following colleagues for their advice, assistance, or support: Dr. Alfred Lerner, Dori Vakis, Robin Heck, Dr. Todd Dray, Dr. Robert Tull, and Dr. Sandy Chun. Thanks also to Lynette Parker of East San Jose Community Law Center for her advice about adoption procedures, and to Mr. Daoud Wahab for sharing his experiences in Afghanistan with me. I am grateful to my dear friend Tamim Ansary for his guidance and support and to the gang at the San Francisco Writers Workshop for their feedback and encouragement. I want to thank my father, my oldest friend and the inspiration for all that is noble in Baba; my mother who prayed for me and did nazr at every stage of this book’s writing; my aunt for buying me books when I was young. Thanks go out to Ali, Sandy, Daoud, Walid, Raya, Shalla, Zahra, Rob, and Kader for reading my stories. I want to thank Dr. and Mrs. Kayoumy—my other parents—for their warmth and unwavering support.

I must thank my agent and friend, Elaine Koster, for her wisdom, patience, and gracious ways, as well as Cindy Spiegel, my keen-eyed and judicious editor who helped me unlock so many doors in this tale. And I would like to thank Susan Petersen Kennedy for taking a chance on this book and the hardworking staff at Riverhead for laboring over it.

Last, I don’t know how to thank my lovely wife, Roya—to whose opinion I am addicted—for her kindness and grace, and for reading, re-reading, and helping me edit every single draft of this novel. For your patience and understanding, I will always love you, Roya jan.

December 2001

I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.

One day last summer, my friend Rahim Khan called from Pakistan. He asked me to come see him. Standing in the kitchen with the receiver to my ear, I knew it wasn’t just Rahim Khan on the line. It was my past of unatoned sins. After I hung up, I went for a walk along Spreckels Lake on the northern edge of Golden Gate Park. The early-afternoon sun sparkled on the water where dozens of miniature boats sailed, propelled by a crisp breeze. Then I glanced up and saw a pair of kites, red with long blue tails, soaring in the sky. They danced high above the trees on the west end of the park, over the windmills, floating side by side like a pair of eyes looking down on San Francisco, the city I now call home. And suddenly Hassan’s voice whispered in my head: For you, a thousand times over. Hassan the harelipped kite runner.

I sat on a park bench near a willow tree. I thought about something Rahim Khan said just before he hung up, almost as an afterthought. There is a way to be good again. I looked up at those twin kites. I thought about Hassan. Thought about Baba. Ali. Kabul. I thought of the life I had lived until the winter of 1975 came along and changed everything. And made me what I am today.

When we were children, Hassan and I used to climb the poplar trees in the driveway of my father’s house and annoy our neighbors by reflecting sunlight into their homes with a shard of mirror. We would sit across from each other on a pair of high branches, our naked feet dangling, our trouser pockets filled with dried mulberries and walnuts. We took turns with the mirror as we ate mulberries, pelted each other with them, giggling, laughing. I can still see Hassan up on that tree, sunlight flickering through the leaves on his almost perfectly round face, a face like a Chinese doll chiseled from hardwood: his flat, broad nose and slanting, narrow eyes like bamboo leaves, eyes that looked, depending on the light, gold, green, even sapphire. I can still see his tiny low-set ears and that pointed stub of a chin, a meaty appendage that looked like it was added as a mere afterthought. And the cleft lip, just left of midline, where the Chinese doll maker’s instrument may have slipped, or perhaps he had simply grown tired and careless.

Sometimes, up in those trees, I talked Hassan into firing walnuts with his slingshot at the neighbor’s one-eyed German shepherd. Hassan never wanted to, but if I asked, really asked, he wouldn’t deny me. Hassan never denied me anything. And he was deadly with his slingshot. Hassan’s father, Ali, used to catch us and get mad, or as mad as someone as gentle as Ali could ever get. He would wag his finger and wave us down from the tree. He would take the mirror and tell us what his mother had told him, that the devil shone mirrors too, shone them to distract Muslims during prayer. “And he laughs while he does it,” he always added, scowling at his son.

“Yes, Father,” Hassan would mumble, looking down at his feet. But he never told on me. Never told that the mirror, like shooting walnuts at the neighbor’s dog, was always my idea.

The poplar trees lined the redbrick driveway, which led to a pair of wrought-iron gates. They in turn opened into an extension of the driveway into my father’s estate. The house sat on the left side of the brick path, the backyard at the end of it.

Everyone agreed that my father, my Baba, had built the most beautiful house in the Wazir Akbar Khan district, a new and affluent neighborhood in the northern part of Kabul. Some thought it was the prettiest house in all of Kabul. A broad entryway flanked by rosebushes led to the sprawling house of marble floors and wide windows. Intricate mosaic tiles, handpicked by Baba in Isfahan, covered the floors of the four bathrooms. Gold-stitched tapestries, which Baba had bought in Calcutta, lined the walls; a crystal chandelier hung from the vaulted ceiling.

Upstairs was my bedroom, Baba’s room, and his study, also known as “the smoking room,” which perpetually smelled of tobacco and cinnamon. Baba and his friends reclined on black leather chairs there after Ali had served dinner. They stuffed their pipes—except Baba always called it “fattening the pipe”—and discussed their favorite three topics: politics, business, soccer. Sometimes I asked Baba if I could sit with them, but Baba would stand in the doorway. “Go on, now,” he’d say. “This is grown-ups’ time. Why don’t you go read one of those books of yours?” He’d close the door, leave me to wonder why it was always grown-ups’ time with him. I’d sit by the door, knees drawn to my chest. Sometimes I sat there for an hour, sometimes two, listening to their laughter, their chatter.

The living room downstairs had a curved wall with custom-built cabinets. Inside sat framed family pictures: an old, grainy photo of my grandfather and King Nadir Shah taken in 1931, two years before the king’s assassination; they are standing over a dead deer, dressed in knee-high boots, rifles slung over their shoulders. There was a picture of my parents’ wedding night, Baba dashing in his black suit and my mother a smiling young princess in white. Here was Baba and his best friend and business partner, Rahim Khan, standing outside our house, neither one smiling—I am a baby in that photograph and Baba is holding me, looking tired and grim. I’m in his arms, but it’s Rahim Khan’s pinky my fingers are curled around.

The curved wall led into the dining room, at the center of which was a mahogany table that could easily sit thirty guests—and, given my father’s taste for extravagant parties, it did just that almost every week. On the other end of the dining room was a tall marble fireplace, always lit by the orange glow of a fire in the wintertime.

A large sliding glass door opened into a semicircular terrace that overlooked two acres of backyard and rows of cherry trees. Baba and Ali had planted a small vegetable garden along the eastern wall: tomatoes, mint, peppers, and a row of corn that never really took. Hassan and I used to call it “the Wall of Ailing Corn.”

On the south end of the garden, in the shadows of a loquat tree, was the servants’ home, a modest little mud hut where Hassan lived with his father.

It was there, in that little shack, that Hassan was born in the winter of 1964, just one year after my mother died giving birth to me.

In the eighteen years that I lived in that house, I stepped into Hassan and Ali’s quarters only a handful of times. When the sun dropped low behind the hills and we were done playing for the day, Hassan and I parted ways. I went past the rosebushes to Baba’s mansion, Hassan to the mud shack where he had been born, where he’d lived his entire life. I remember it was spare, clean, dimly lit by a pair of kerosene lamps. There were two mattresses on opposite sides of the room, a worn Herati rug with frayed edges in between, a three-legged stool, and a wooden table in the corner where Hassan did his drawings. The walls stood bare, save for a single tapestry with sewn-in beads forming the words Allah-u-akbar. Baba had bought it for Ali on one of his trips to Mashad.

It was in that small shack that Hassan’s mother, Sanaubar, gave birth to him one cold winter day in 1964. While my mother hemorrhaged to death during childbirth, Hassan lost his less than a week after he was born. Lost her to a fate most Afghans considered far worse than death: She ran off with a clan of traveling singers and dancers.

Hassan never talked about his mother, as if she’d never existed. I always wondered if he dreamed about her, about what she looked like, where she was. I wondered if he longed to meet her. Did he ache for her, the way I ached for the mother I had never met? One day, we were walking from my father’s house to Cinema Zainab for a new Iranian movie, taking the shortcut through the military barracks near Istiqlal Middle School—Baba had forbidden us to take that shortcut, but he was in Pakistan with Rahim Khan at the time. We hopped the fence that surrounded the barracks, skipped over a little creek, and broke into the open dirt field where old, abandoned tanks collected dust. A group of soldiers huddled in the shade of one of those tanks, smoking cigarettes and playing cards. One of them saw us, elbowed the guy next to him, and called Hassan.

“Hey, you!” he said. “I know you.”

We had never seen him before. He was a squatty man with a shaved head and black stubble on his face. The way he grinned at us, leered, scared me. “Just keep walking,” I muttered to Hassan.

“You! The Hazara! Look at me when I’m talking to you!” the soldier barked. He handed his cigarette to the guy next to him, made a circle with the thumb and index finger of one hand. Poked the middle finger of his other hand through the circle. Poked it in and out. In and out. “I knew your mother, did you know that? I knew her real good. I took her from behind by that creek over there.”

The soldiers laughed. One of them made a squealing sound. I told Hassan to keep walking, keep walking.

“What a tight little sugary cunt she had!” the soldier was saying, shaking hands with the others, grinning. Later, in the dark, after the movie had started, I heard Hassan next to me, croaking. Tears were sliding down his cheeks. I reached across my seat, slung my arm around him, pulled him close. He rested his head on my shoulder. “He took you for someone else,” I whispered. “He took you for someone else.”

I’m told no one was really surprised when Sanaubar eloped. People had raised their eyebrows when Ali, a man who had memorized the Koran, married Sanaubar, a woman nineteen years younger, a beautiful but notoriously unscrupulous woman who lived up to her dishonorable reputation. Like Ali, she was a Shi’a Muslim and an ethnic Hazara. She was also his first cousin and therefore a natural choice for a spouse. But beyond those similarities, Ali and Sanaubar had little in common, least of all their respective appearances. While Sanaubar’s brilliant green eyes and impish face had, rumor has it, tempted countless men into sin, Ali had a congenital paralysis of his lower facial muscles, a condition that rendered him unable to smile and left him perpetually grim-faced. It was an odd thing to see the stone-faced Ali happy, or sad, because only his slanted brown eyes glinted with a smile or welled with sorrow. People say that eyes are windows to the soul. Never was that more true than with Ali, who could only reveal himself through his eyes.

I have heard that Sanaubar’s suggestive stride and oscillating hips sent men to reveries of infidelity. But polio had left Ali with a twisted, atrophied right leg that was sallow skin over bone with little in between except a paper-thin layer of muscle. I remember one day, when I was eight, Ali was taking me to the bazaar to buy some naan. I was walking behind him, humming, trying to imitate his walk. I watched him swing his scraggy leg in a sweeping arc, watched his whole body tilt impossibly to the right every time he planted that foot. It seemed a minor miracle he didn’t tip over with each step. When I tried it, I almost fell into the gutter. That got me giggling. Ali turned around, caught me aping him. He didn’t say anything. Not then, not ever. He just kept walking.

Ali’s face and his walk frightened some of the younger children in the neighborhood. But the real trouble was with the older kids. They chased him on the street, and mocked him when he hobbled by. Some had taken to calling him Babalu, or Boogeyman. “Hey, Babalu, who did you eat today?” they barked to a chorus of laughter. “Who did you eat, you flat-nosed Babalu?”

They called him “flat-nosed” because of Ali and Hassan’s characteristic Hazara Mongoloid features. For years, that was all I knew about the Hazaras, that they were Mogul descendants, and that they looked a little like Chinese people. School textbooks barely mentioned them and referred to their ancestry only in passing. Then one day, I was in Baba’s study, looking through his stuff, when I found one of my mother’s old history books. It was written by an Iranian named Khorami. I blew the dust off it, sneaked it into bed with me that night, and was stunned to find an entire chapter on Hazara history. An entire chapter dedicated to Hassan’s people! In it, I read that my people, the Pashtuns, had persecuted and oppressed the Hazaras. It said the Hazaras had tried to rise against the Pashtuns in the nineteenth century, but the Pashtuns had “quelled them with unspeakable violence.” The book said that my people had killed the Hazaras, driven them from their lands, burned their homes, and sold their women. The book said part of the reason Pashtuns had oppressed the Hazaras was that Pashtuns were Sunni Muslims, while Hazaras were Shi’a. The book said a lot of things I didn’t know, things my teachers hadn’t mentioned. Things Baba hadn’t mentioned either. It also said some things I did know, like that people called Hazaras mice-eating, flat-nosed, load-carrying donkeys. I had heard some of the kids in the neighborhood yell those names to Hassan.

The following week, after class, I showed the book to my teacher and pointed to the chapter on the Hazaras. He skimmed through a couple of pages, snickered, handed the book back. “That’s the one thing Shi’a people do well,” he said, picking up his papers, “passing themselves as martyrs.” He wrinkled his nose when he said the word Shi’a, like it was some kind of disease.

But despite sharing ethnic heritage and family blood, Sanaubar joined the neighborhood kids in taunting Ali. I have heard that she made no secret of her disdain for his appearance.

“This is a husband?” she would sneer. “I have seen old donkeys better suited to be a husband.”

In the end, most people suspected the marriage had been an arrangement of sorts between Ali and his uncle, Sanaubar’s father. They said Ali had married his cousin to help restore some honor to his uncle’s blemished name, even though Ali, who had been orphaned at the age of five, had no worldly possessions or inheritance to speak of.

Ali never retaliated against any of his tormentors, I suppose partly because he could never catch them with that twisted leg dragging behind him. But mostly because Ali was immune to the insults of his assailants; he had found his joy, his antidote, the moment Sanaubar had given birth to Hassan. It had been a simple enough affair. No obstetricians, no anesthesiologists, no fancy monitoring devices. Just Sanaubar lying on a stained, naked mattress with Ali and a midwife helping her. She hadn’t needed much help at all, because, even in birth, Hassan was true to his nature: He was incapable of hurting anyone. A few grunts, a couple of pushes, and out came Hassan. Out he came smiling.

As confided to a neighbor’s servant by the garrulous midwife, who had then in turn told anyone who would listen, Sanaubar had taken one glance at the baby in Ali’s arms, seen the cleft lip, and barked a bitter laughter.

“There,” she had said. “Now you have your own idiot child to do all your smiling for you!” She had refused to even hold Hassan, and just five days later, she was gone.

Baba hired the same nursing woman who had fed me to nurse Hassan. Ali told us she was a blue-eyed Hazara woman from Bamiyan, the city of the giant Buddha statues. “What a sweet singing voice she had,” he used to say to us.

What did she sing, Hassan and I always asked, though we already knew—Ali had told us countless times. We just wanted to hear Ali sing.

He’d clear his throat and begin:

On a high mountain I stood,

And cried the name of Ali, Lion of God.

O Ali, Lion of God, King of Men,

Bring joy to our sorrowful hearts.

Then he would remind us that there was a brotherhood between people who had fed from the same breast, a kinship that not even time could break.

Hassan and I fed from the same breasts. We took our first steps on the same lawn in the same yard. And, under the same roof, we spoke our first words.

Mine was Baba.

His was Amir. My name.

Looking back on it now, I think the foundation for what happened in the winter of 1975—and all that followed—was already laid in those first words.

Lore has it my father once wrestled a black bear in Baluchistan with his bare hands. If the story had been about anyone else, it would have been dismissed as laaf, that Afghan tendency to exaggerate—sadly, almost a national affliction; if someone bragged that his son was a doctor, chances were the kid had once passed a biology test in high school. But no one ever doubted the veracity of any story about Baba. And if they did, well, Baba did have those three parallel scars coursing a jagged path down his back. I have imagined Baba’s wrestling match countless times, even dreamed about it. And in those dreams, I can never tell Baba from the bear.

It was Rahim Khan who first referred to him as what eventually became Baba’s famous nickname, Toophan agha, or “Mr. Hurricane.” It was an apt enough nickname. My father was a force of nature, a towering Pashtun specimen with a thick beard, a wayward crop of curly brown hair as unruly as the man himself, hands that looked capable of uprooting a willow tree, and a black glare that would “drop the devil to his knees begging for mercy,” as Rahim Khan used to say. At parties, when all six-foot-five of him thundered into the room, attention shifted to him like sunflowers turning to the sun.

Baba was impossible to ignore, even in his sleep. I used to bury cotton wisps in my ears, pull the blanket over my head, and still the sounds of Baba’s snoring—so much like a growling truck engine—penetrated the walls. And my room was across the hall from Baba’s bedroom. How my mother ever managed to sleep in the same room as him is a mystery to me. It’s on the long list of things I would have asked my mother if I had ever met her.

In the late 1960s, when I was five or six, Baba decided to build an orphanage. I heard the story through Rahim Khan. He told me Baba had drawn the blueprints himself despite the fact that he’d had no architectural experience at all. Skeptics had urged him to stop his foolishness and hire an architect. Of course, Baba refused, and everyone shook their heads in dismay at his obstinate ways. Then Baba succeeded and everyone shook their heads in awe at his triumphant ways. Baba paid for the construction of the two-story orphanage, just off the main strip of Jadeh Maywand south of the Kabul River, with his own money. Rahim Khan told me Baba had personally funded the entire project, paying for the engineers, electricians, plumbers, and laborers, not to mention the city officials whose “mustaches needed oiling.”

It took three years to build the orphanage. I was eight by then. I remember the day before the orphanage opened, Baba took me to Ghargha Lake, a few miles north of Kabul. He asked me to fetch Hassan too, but I lied and told him Hassan had the runs. I wanted Baba all to myself. And besides, one time at Ghargha Lake, Hassan and I were skimming stones and Hassan made his stone skip eight times. The most I managed was five. Baba was there, watching, and he patted Hassan on the back. Even put his arm around his shoulder.

We sat at a picnic table on the banks of the lake, just Baba and me, eating boiled eggs with kofta sandwiches—meatballs and pickles wrapped in naan. The water was a deep blue and sunlight glittered on its looking glass–clear surface. On Fridays, the lake was bustling with families out for a day in the sun. But it was midweek and there was only Baba and me, us and a couple of longhaired, bearded tourists—“hippies,” I’d heard them called. They were sitting on the dock, feet dangling in the water, fishing poles in hand. I asked Baba why they grew their hair long, but Baba grunted, didn’t answer. He was preparing his speech for the next day, flipping through a havoc of handwritten pages, making notes here and there with a pencil. I bit into my egg and asked Baba if it was true what a boy in school had told me, that if you ate a piece of eggshell, you’d have to pee it out. Baba grunted again.

I took a bite of my sandwich. One of the yellow-haired tourists laughed and slapped the other one on the back. In the distance, across the lake, a truck lumbered around a corner on the hill. Sunlight twinkled in its side-view mirror.

“I think I have saratan,” I said. Cancer. Baba lifted his head from the pages flapping in the breeze. Told me I could get the soda myself, all I had to do was look in the trunk of the car.

Outside the orphanage, the next day, they ran out of chairs. A lot of people had to stand to watch the opening ceremony. It was a windy day, and I sat behind Baba on the little podium just outside the main entrance of the new building. Baba was wearing a green suit and a caracul hat. Midway through the speech, the wind knocked his hat off and everyone laughed. He motioned to me to hold his hat for him and I was glad to, because then everyone would see that he was my father, my Baba. He turned back to the microphone and said he hoped the building was sturdier than his hat, and everyone laughed again. When Baba ended his speech, people stood up and cheered. They clapped for a long time. Afterward, people shook his hand. Some of them tousled my hair and shook my hand too. I was so proud of Baba, of us.

But despite Baba’s successes, people were always doubting him. They told Baba that running a business wasn’t in his blood and he should study law like his father. So Baba proved them all wrong by not only running his own business but becoming one of the richest merchants in Kabul. Baba and Rahim Khan built a wildly successful carpet-exporting business, two pharmacies, and a restaurant.

When people scoffed that Baba would never marry well—after all, he was not of royal blood—he wedded my mother, Sofia Akrami, a highly educated woman universally regarded as one of Kabul’s most respected, beautiful, and virtuous ladies. And not only did she teach classic Farsi literature at the university, she was a descendant of the royal family, a fact that my father playfully rubbed in the skeptics’ faces by referring to her as “my princess.”

With me as the glaring exception, my father molded the world around him to his liking. The problem, of course, was that Baba saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can’t love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little.

When I was in fifth grade, we had a mullah who taught us about Islam. His name was Mullah Fatiullah Khan, a short, stubby man with a face full of acne scars and a gruff voice. He lectured us about the virtues of zakat and the duty of hadj; he taught us the intricacies of performing the five daily namaz prayers, and made us memorize verses from the Koran—and though he never translated the words for us, he did stress, sometimes with the help of a stripped willow branch, that we had to pronounce the Arabic words correctly so God would hear us better. He told us one day that Islam considered drinking a terrible sin; those who drank would answer for their sin on the day of Qiyamat, Judgment Day. In those days, drinking was fairly common in Kabul. No one gave you a public lashing for it, but those Afghans who did drink did so in private, out of respect. People bought their scotch as “medicine” in brown paper bags from selected “pharmacies.” They would leave with the bag tucked out of sight, sometimes drawing furtive, disapproving glances from those who knew about the store’s reputation for such transactions.

We were upstairs in Baba’s study, the smoking room, when I told him what Mullah Fatiullah Khan had taught us in class. Baba was pouring himself a whiskey from the bar he had built in the corner of the room. He listened, nodded, took a sip from his drink. Then he lowered himself into the leather sofa, put down his drink, and propped me up on his lap. I felt as if I were sitting on a pair of tree trunks. He took a deep breath and exhaled through his nose, the air hissing through his mustache for what seemed an eternity. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to hug him or leap from his lap in mortal fear.

“I see you’ve confused what you’re learning in school with actual education,” he said in his thick voice.

“But if what he said is true then does it make you a sinner, Baba?”

“Hmm.” Baba crushed an ice cube between his teeth. “Do you want to know what your father thinks about sin?”

“Then I’ll tell you,” Baba said, “but first understand this and understand it now, Amir: You’ll never learn anything of value from those bearded idiots.”

“You mean Mullah Fatiullah Khan?”

Baba gestured with his glass. The ice clinked. “I mean all of them. Piss on the beards of all those self-righteous monkeys.”

I began to giggle. The image of Baba pissing on the beard of any monkey, self-righteous or otherwise, was too much.

“They do nothing but thumb their prayer beads and recite a book written in a tongue they don’t even understand.” He took a sip. “God help us all if Afghanistan ever falls into their hands.”

“But Mullah Fatiullah Khan seems nice,” I managed between bursts of tittering.

“So did Genghis Khan,” Baba said. “But enough about that. You asked about sin and I want to tell you. Are you listening?”

“Yes,” I said, pressing my lips together. But a chortle escaped through my nose and made a snorting sound. That got me giggling again.

Baba’s stony eyes bore into mine and, just like that, I wasn’t laughing anymore. “I mean to speak to you man to man. Do you think you can handle that for once?”

“Yes, Baba jan,” I muttered, marveling, not for the first time, at how badly Baba could sting me with so few words. We’d had a fleeting good moment—it wasn’t often Baba talked to me, let alone on his lap—and I’d been a fool to waste it.

“Good,” Baba said, but his eyes wondered. “Now, no matter what the mullah teaches, there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. Do you understand that?”

“No, Baba jan,” I said, desperately wishing I did. I didn’t want to disappoint him again.

Baba heaved a sigh of impatience. That stung too, because he was not an impatient man. I remembered all the times he didn’t come home until after dark, all the times I ate dinner alone. I’d ask Ali where Baba was, when he was coming home, though I knew full well he was at the construction site, overlooking this, supervising that. Didn’t that take patience? I already hated all the kids he was building the orphanage for; sometimes I wished they’d all died along with their parents.

“When you kill a man, you steal a life,” Baba said. “You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. Do you see?”

I did. When Baba was six, a thief walked into my grandfather’s house in the middle of the night. My grandfather, a respected judge, confronted him, but the thief stabbed him in the throat, killing him instantly—and robbing Baba of a father. The townspeople caught the killer just before noon the next day; he turned out to be a wanderer from the Kunduz region. They hanged him from the branch of an oak tree with still two hours to go before afternoon prayer. It was Rahim Khan, not Baba, who had told me that story. I was always learning things about Baba from other people.

“There is no act more wretched than stealing, Amir,” Baba said. “A man who takes what’s not his to take, be it a life or a loaf of naan…I spit on such a man. And if I ever cross paths with him, God help him. Do you understand?”

I found the idea of Baba clobbering a thief both exhilarating and terribly frightening. “Yes, Baba.”

“If there’s a God out there, then I would hope he has more important things to attend to than my drinking scotch or eating pork. Now, hop down. All this talk about sin has made me thirsty again.”

I watched him fill his glass at the bar and wondered how much time would pass before we talked again the way we just had. Because the truth of it was, I always felt like Baba hated me a little. And why not? After all, I had killed his beloved wife, his beautiful princess, hadn’t I? The least I could have done was to have had the decency to have turned out a little more like him. But I hadn’t turned out like him. Not at all.

IN SCHOOL, we used to play a game called Sherjangi, or “Battle of the Poems.” The Farsi teacher moderated it and it went something like this: You recited a verse from a poem and your opponent had sixty seconds to reply with a verse that began with the same letter that ended yours. Everyone in my class wanted me on their team, because by the time I was eleven, I could recite dozens of verses from Khayyám, Hãfez, or Rumi’s famous Masnawi. One time, I took on the whole class and won. I told Baba about it later that night, but he just nodded, muttered, “Good.”

That was how I escaped my father’s aloofness, in my dead mother’s books. That and Hassan, of course. I read everything, Rumi, Hãfez, Saadi, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Ian Fleming. When I had finished my mother’s books—not the boring history ones, I was never much into those, but the novels, the epics—I started spending my allowance on books. I bought one a week from the bookstore near Cinema Park, and stored them in cardboard boxes when I ran out of shelf room.

Of course, marrying a poet was one thing, but fathering a son who preferred burying his face in poetry books to hunting…well, that wasn’t how Baba had envisioned it, I suppose. Real men didn’t read poetry—and God forbid they should ever write it! Real men—real boys—played soccer just as Baba had when he had been young. Now that was something to be passionate about. In 1970, Baba took a break from the construction of the orphanage and flew to Tehran for a month to watch the World Cup games on television, since at the time Afghanistan didn’t have TVs yet. He signed me up for soccer teams to stir the same passion in me. But I was pathetic, a blundering liability to my own team, always in the way of an opportune pass or unwittingly blocking an open lane. I shambled about the field on scraggy legs, squalled for passes that never came my way. And the harder I tried, waving my arms over my head frantically and screeching, “I’m open! I’m open!” the more I went ignored. But Baba wouldn’t give up. When it became abundantly clear that I hadn’t inherited a shred of his athletic talents, he settled for trying to turn me into a passionate spectator. Certainly I could manage that, couldn’t I? I faked interest for as long as possible. I cheered with him when Kabul’s team scored against Kandahar and yelped insults at the referee when he called a penalty against our team. But Baba sensed my lack of genuine interest and resigned himself to the bleak fact that his son was never going to either play or watch soccer.

I remember one time Baba took me to the yearly Buzkashi tournament that took place on the first day of spring, New Year’s Day. Buzkashi was, and still is, Afghanistan’s national passion. A chapandaz, a highly skilled horseman usually patronized by rich aficionados, has to snatch a goat or cattle carcass from the midst of a melee, carry that carcass with him around the stadium at full gallop, and drop it in a scoring circle while a team of other chapandaz chases him and does everything in its power—kick, claw, whip, punch—to snatch the carcass from him. That day, the crowd roared with excitement as the horsemen on the field bellowed their battle cries and jostled for the carcass in a cloud of dust. The earth trembled with the clatter of hooves. We watched from the upper bleachers as riders pounded past us at full gallop, yipping and yelling, foam flying from their horses’ mouths.

At one point Baba pointed to someone. “Amir, do you see that man sitting up there with those other men around him?”

“That’s Henry Kissinger.”

“Oh,” I said. I didn’t know who Henry Kissinger was, and I might have asked. But at the moment, I watched with horror as one of the chapandaz fell off his saddle and was trampled under a score of hooves. His body was tossed and hurled in the stampede like a rag doll, finally rolling to a stop when the melee moved on. He twitched once and lay motionless, his legs bent at unnatural angles, a pool of his blood soaking through the sand.

I began to cry.

I cried all the way back home. I remember how Baba’s hands clenched around the steering wheel. Clenched and unclenched. Mostly, I will never forget Baba’s valiant efforts to conceal the disgusted look on his face as he drove in silence.

Later that night, I was passing by my father’s study when I overheard him speaking to Rahim Khan. I pressed my ear to the closed door.

“—grateful that he’s healthy,” Rahim Khan was saying.

“I know, I know. But he’s always buried in those books or shuffling around the house like he’s lost in some dream.”

“I wasn’t like that.” Baba sounded frustrated, almost angry.

Rahim Khan laughed. “Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors.”

“I’m telling you,” Baba said, “I wasn’t like that at all, and neither were any of the kids I grew up with.”

“You know, sometimes you are the most self-centered man I know,” Rahim Khan said. He was the only person I knew who could get away with saying something like that to Baba.

“It has nothing to do with that.”

“Then what?”

I heard the leather of Baba’s seat creaking as he shifted on it. I closed my eyes, pressed my ear even harder against the door, wanting to hear, not wanting to hear. “Sometimes I look out this window and I see him playing on the street with the neighborhood boys. I see how they push him around, take his toys from him, give him a shove here, a whack there. And, you know, he never fights back. Never. He just…drops his head and…”

“So he’s not violent,” Rahim Khan said.

“That’s not what I mean, Rahim, and you know it,” Baba shot back. “There is something missing in that boy.”

“Yes, a mean streak.”

“Self-defense has nothing to do with meanness. You know what always happens when the neighborhood boys tease him? Hassan steps in and fends them off. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. And when they come home, I say to him, ‘How did Hassan get that scrape on his face?’ And he says, ‘He fell down.’ I’m telling you, Rahim, there is something missing in that boy.”

“You just need to let him find his way,” Rahim Khan said.

“And where is he headed?” Baba said. “A boy who won’t stand up for himself becomes a man who can’t stand up to anything.”

“As usual you’re oversimplifying.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’re angry because you’re afraid he’ll never take over the business for you.”

“Now who’s oversimplifying?” Baba said. “Look, I know there’s a fondness between you and him and I’m happy about that. Envious, but happy. I mean that. He needs someone who…understands him, because God knows I don’t. But something about Amir troubles me in a way that I can’t express. It’s like…” I could see him searching, reaching for the right words. He lowered his voice, but I heard him anyway. “If I hadn’t seen the doctor pull him out of my wife with my own eyes, I’d never believe he’s my son.”

THE NEXT MORNING, as he was preparing my breakfast, Hassan asked if something was bothering me. I snapped at him, told him to mind his own business.

Rahim Khan had been wrong about the mean streak thing.

In 1933, the year Baba was born and the year Zahir Shah began his forty-year reign of Afghanistan, two brothers, young men from a wealthy and reputable family in Kabul, got behind the wheel of their father’s Ford roadster. High on hashish and mast on French wine, they struck and killed a Hazara husband and wife on the road to Paghman. The police brought the somewhat contrite young men and the dead couple’s five-year-old orphan boy before my grandfather, who was a highly regarded judge and a man of impeccable reputation. After hearing the brothers’ account and their father’s plea for mercy, my grandfather ordered the two young men to go to Kandahar at once and enlist in the army for one year—this despite the fact that their family had somehow managed to obtain them exemptions from the draft. Their father argued, but not too vehemently, and in the end, everyone agreed that the punishment had been perhaps harsh but fair. As for the orphan, my grandfather adopted him into his own household, and told the other servants to tutor him, but to be kind to him. That boy was Ali.

Ali and Baba grew up together as childhood playmates—at least until polio crippled Ali’s leg—just like Hassan and I grew up a generation later. Baba was always telling us about the mischief he and Ali used to cause, and Ali would shake his head and say, “But, Agha sahib, tell them who was the architect of the mischief and who the poor laborer?” Baba would laugh and throw his arm around Ali.

But in none of his stories did Baba ever refer to Ali as his friend.

The curious thing was, I never thought of Hassan and me as friends either. Not in the usual sense, anyhow. Never mind that we taught each other to ride a bicycle with no hands, or to build a fully functional homemade camera out of a cardboard box. Never mind that we spent entire winters flying kites, running kites. Never mind that to me, the face of Afghanistan is that of a boy with a thin-boned frame, a shaved head, and low-set ears, a boy with a Chinese doll face perpetually lit by a harelipped smile.

Never mind any of those things. Because history isn’t easy to overcome. Neither is religion. In the end, I was a Pashtun and he was a Hazara, I was Sunni and he was Shi’a, and nothing was ever going to change that. Nothing.

But we were kids who had learned to crawl together, and no history, ethnicity, society, or religion was going to change that either. I spent most of the first twelve years of my life playing with Hassan. Sometimes, my entire childhood seems like one long lazy summer day with Hassan, chasing each other between tangles of trees in my father’s yard, playing hide-and-seek, cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, insect torture—with our crowning achievement undeniably the time we plucked the stinger off a bee and tied a string around the poor thing to yank it back every time it took flight.

We chased the Kochi, the nomads who passed through Kabul on their way to the mountains of the north. We would hear their caravans approaching our neighborhood, the mewling of their sheep, the baaing of their goats, the jingle of bells around their camels’ necks. We’d run outside to watch the caravan plod through our street, men with dusty, weather-beaten faces and women dressed in long, colorful shawls, beads, and silver bracelets around their wrists and ankles. We hurled pebbles at their goats. We squirted water on their mules. I’d make Hassan sit on the Wall of Ailing Corn and fire pebbles with his slingshot at the camels’ rears.

We saw our first Western together, Rio Bravo with John Wayne, at the Cinema Park, across the street from my favorite bookstore. I remember begging Baba to take us to Iran so we could meet John Wayne. Baba burst out in gales of his deep-throated laughter—a sound not unlike a truck engine revving up—and, when he could talk again, explained to us the concept of voice dubbing. Hassan and I were stunned. Dazed. John Wayne didn’t really speak Farsi and he wasn’t Iranian! He was American, just like the friendly, longhaired men and women we always saw hanging around in Kabul, dressed in their tattered, brightly colored shirts. We saw Rio Bravo three times, but we saw our favorite Western, The Magnificent Seven, thirteen times. With each viewing, we cried at the end when the Mexican kids buried Charles Bronson—who, as it turned out, wasn’t Iranian either.

We took strolls in the musty-smelling bazaars of the Shar-e-Nau section of Kabul, or the new city, west of the Wazir Akbar Khan district. We talked about whatever film we had just seen and walked amid the bustling crowds of bazarris. We snaked our way among the merchants and the beggars, wandered through narrow alleys cramped with rows of tiny, tightly packed stalls. Baba gave us each a weekly allowance of ten Afghanis and we spent it on warm Coca-Cola and rosewater ice cream topped with crushed pistachios.

During the school year, we had a daily routine. By the time I dragged myself out of bed and lumbered to the bathroom, Hassan had already washed up, prayed the morning namaz with Ali, and prepared my breakfast: hot black tea with three sugar cubes and a slice of toasted naan topped with my favorite sour cherry marmalade, all neatly placed on the dining table. While I ate and complained about homework, Hassan made my bed, polished my shoes, ironed my outfit for the day, packed my books and pencils. I’d hear him singing to himself in the foyer as he ironed, singing old Hazara songs in his nasal voice. Then, Baba and I drove off in his black Ford Mustang—a car that drew envious looks everywhere because it was the same car Steve McQueen had driven in Bullitt, a film that played in one theater for six months. Hassan stayed home and helped Ali with the day’s chores: hand-washing dirty clothes and hanging them to dry in the yard, sweeping the floors, buying fresh naan from the bazaar, marinating meat for dinner, watering the lawn.

After school, Hassan and I met up, grabbed a book, and trotted up a bowl-shaped hill just north of my father’s property in Wazir Akbar Khan. There was an old abandoned cemetery atop the hill with rows of unmarked headstones and tangles of brushwood clogging the aisles. Seasons of rain and snow had turned the iron gate rusty and left the cemetery’s low white stone walls in decay. There was a pomegranate tree near the entrance to the cemetery. One summer day, I used one of Ali’s kitchen knives to carve our names on it: “Amir and Hassan, the sultans of Kabul.” Those words made it formal: the tree was ours. After school, Has-san and I climbed its branches and snatched its bloodred pomegranates. After we’d eaten the fruit and wiped our hands on the grass, I would read to Hassan.

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ 159463193X
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Riverhead Books; 1st edition (March 5, 2013)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9781594631931
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1594631931
• Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 840L
• Grade level ‏ : ‎ 9 - 12
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.5 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.13 x 1.04 x 8 inches
• #38 in Family Saga Fiction
• #63 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
• #170 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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Khaled hosseini.

Khaled Hosseini is one of the most widely read and beloved novelists in the world, with over thirty eight million copies of his books sold in more than seventy countries. The Kite Runner was a major film and was a Book of the Decade, chosen by The Times, Daily Telegraph and Guardian. A Thousand Splendid Suns was the Richard & Judy Best Read of the Year in 2008. Hosseini is also a Goodwill Envoy to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the UN Refugee Agency and the founder of The Khaled Hosseini Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation which provides humanitarian assistance to the people of Afghanistan. He was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, and lives in northern California.

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