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 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.


Khaled Hosseini

What a story!!!!
I could hardly put this book down once I had begun to read it.
I have read a lot of books about China, Japan, India, and might be a bit tired of them. Afghanistan was a welcomed new aquaintance (spelling?).
This book was so good partly because it was written by an Afghan, he knows the customs, the people, the history.
I have ordered the latest book by Mr. Hosseini; "A thousand splendid suns", it should arrive in about a week or so. Can't wait to read it!


This book is now reserved for Aspen72 Tuesday 28th August 2007 at Turku BC miitti

This book participates in the Stop the fire-save the forests release challenge

Greece in flames from CNN.com

Thank you for the book!!!!
I suppose this won't stay in tbr-pile too long because of good recommendations :)

This book is wonderful. I liked the story, and especially the way it showed traditions, feelings, and the book was exciting, too - but must say that all taliban terror was not the 'thing' that captured me. I read the book within approx a week, and in the end I just had to read without breaks. And the end was so full of hope. Hosseini seems to really understand human mind/psyche.
Somehow it's so sad that Afghanistan, like Iran, has been so rich and modern country before the decades of war.

I felt before reading this book that it has been waiting for ages in my shelf, and now I'm a bit surprised that only 5 months has passed, funny...

Edit:
Something to remember from this book: Mullah Nasruddin jokes (pp. 245). For you, a thousand times over.

#11 release in Keep them moving 2008 challenge

Thanks Aspen!
(She saw that I'd entered an international RABCK on the forum asking for this book and gave it as a RABCK herself)

Looking forward to reading this - but oh dear, my TBR pile is growing so much that I think I need to buy a new bookshelf. Ironic really when I joined BC I thought it was a way of recycling/passing on mybooks!!! lol!

I've had the book (from my wishlist) on my shelf since February when ASPEN surprised me with it as a RABCK and after having read My Forbidden Face (also set in Kabul) http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/5182277 - with it's references to kite flying in the city, I absolutely wanted to read The Kite Runner next.

I read it in one sitting! From cover -to cover - reading until the wee hours of the morning, because I could NOT put this book down. It's beautifully written, and yes is a story of struggle and redemption, and of growing up. The front cover is a bit deceptive. It portrays a much younger boy that I imagined Amir to be at least!

The image of flying a kite is a wonderful one. Freedom in the skies. But it was also interesting to me how this was a competatitve sport. And I could see the kite runners - trying to catch the kites that were knocked out of the sky!

quotes that hit home
Brezhev is massacring Afghans and all that peanut eater [President Jimmy Carter] can say is I won't come swim in your pool [Ref to the decision to boycott the Moscow Olympic Games] p 117

Every woman needed a husband. Even if he did silence the song in her. p 164

Afghanistan/Taliban
While in power, the Taliban implemented the "strictest interpretation of Sharia law ever seen in the Muslim world,"[6] and became notorious internationally for their treatment of women. (Wikipedia)

Unlike My Forbidden Face this book does not focus so much on what life was like under the Taliban - though the desperate situation is portrayed very clearly at the end of the book - what it does show - in detail - is that the desire for ethnic clensing still goes on and that makes me sick. This story is a story of redemption, yes, but is there a real evil in this nationalistic pride that comes up again and again in mankind and spills over into persecution and even genocide. We -nation by nation, peoples by peoples - need to be redeemed from that curse!

CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:

It's time to let this book go. Hope it enjoys its new temporary home before being re-released again.

I love reading where books end up -and what other readers thought of the book (good and bad!) - so do please take time to make a journal entry if you possibly can. Appreciate that!

Really pleased to receive this book and looking forward to reading it.