The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
A few years ago I read A Thousand Splendid Suns, which I found quite confronting and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to read this one, but I was having coffee with a friend when her copy was returned, so I thought it was time to give it a go.
Here is the blurb …
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.
I found it compelling – there was always a feeling of ‘and then what happened?’. I enjoyed the stories of an Afghanistan before all of the conflict, escaping over the border and eventually to the US, their new life in the US and then finally returning to Afghanistan searching for redemption. This novel provides insight into another time and place and (maybe) helps us understand Afghanistan today.
This story felt like an oral tale – someone telling their story in bits and pieces. Terrible things do happen, so it is not for the faint-hearted.
More reviews …
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/sep/07/fiction.features1