by Khaled Hosseini
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by Calum Kerr
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by Markus Zusak
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by Audrey Niffenegger
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by John Boyne
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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
In Kabul in the early 1970s, 12-year-old Amir is seeking to win the approval of his rich merchant father by winning an annual "kite-fighting" contest with his best friend, Amir. What follows exposes the social and cultural gulf between the two friends in a way which will deeply mark their lives. Set against a sequence of momentous upheavals in Afghanistan (the fall of the monarchy, the Russian invasion, the rise of the Taliban) and moving between there and periods of exile in the United States, Hosseini's novel intriguingly combines an ambitious narrative purview with a convincingly detailed portrayal of particular lives and fortunes. Like his protagonists, the author was himself born in Afghanistan and became a political exile in the USA in 1980. This bi-location lends a fascinating double perspective to a more than promising novel.
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