The Kite Runner

Khaled Hosseini's stunning debut novel The Kite Runner follows a young boy, Amir, as he faces the challenges that confront him on the path to manhood, testing friendships, finding love, cheating death, accepting faults, and gaining understanding. Khaled Hosseini, born in 1965 in Kabul, Afghanistan was inspired by his own life growing in such a hostile environment. Being the oldest of five children he witnessed a bloody communist coup and the Soviet invasion. After being granted political asylum in 1980 to the United States, Khaled and his family moved to San Jose, California. Shortly after he wed, had children and jump started a career as a physician Khaled published his first novel The Kite Runner.

Living in Afghanistan in the 1960s, Amir enjoys a life of privilege that is shaped by his brotherly friendship with Hassan, his servant's son. Amir lives in constant want of his father's attention, feeling that he is a failure in his father's eyes. Hassan, on the other hand, seems to be able to do no wrong. Their friendship is a complex tapestry of love, loss, privilege, and shame. Striving to be the son his father always wanted, Amir takes on the weight of living up to unrealistic expectations and places the fate of his relationship with his father on the outcome of a kite running tournament, a popular challenge in which participants must cut down the kites of others with their own kite. The kite fighting tournament was an old tradition in Afghanistan. It started early in the morning on the day of the contest and did not end until the winning kite flew in the sky. People gathered in the streets and roofs of their homes to cheer for the kids. The streets filled with kite fighters, jerking and tugging on their lines, trying to gain position to cut the oppenent's line.

Amir wins the tournament. Yet just as he begins to feel that all will be right in the world, a tragedy occurs with his friend Hassan in a back alley on the very streets where the boys once played. This moment marks a turning point in Amir's life--one whose memory he seeks to bury by moving to America. There he realizes his dream of becoming a writer and marries for love but the memory of that fateful day will prove too strong to forget. Eventually it draws Amir back to Afghanistan to right the wrongs that began that day in the alley and continued in the days, months, and years that followed.

I found the novel The Kite Runner to be