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Audio CD Description In his debut novel, The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini accomplishes what very few contemporary novelists are able to do. He manages to provide an educational and eye-opening account of a country's political turmoil--in this case, Afghanistan--while also developing characters whose heartbreaking struggles and emotional triumphs resonate with readers long after the last page has been turned over. And he does this on his first try. The Kite Runner follows the story of Amir, the privileged son of a wealthy businessman in Kabul, and Hassan, the son of Amir's father's servant. As children in the relatively stable Afghanistan of the early 1970s, the boys are inseparable. They spend idyllic days running kites and telling stories of mystical places and powerful warriors until an unspeakable event changes the nature of their relationship forever, and eventually cements their bond in ways neither boy could have ever predicted. Even after Amir and his father flee to America, Amir remains haunted by his cowardly actions and disloyalty. In part, it is these demons and the sometimes impossible quest for forgiveness that bring him back to his war-torn native land after it comes under Taliban rule. ("...I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.") Some of the plot's turns and twists may be somewhat implausible, but Hosseini has created characters that seem so real that one almost forgets that The Kite Runner is a novel and not a memoir. At a time when Afghanistan has been thrust into the forefront of America's collective consciousness ("people sipping lattes at Starbucks were talking about the battle for Kunduz"), Hosseini offers an honest, sometimes tragic, sometimes funny, but always heartfelt view of a fascinating land. Perhaps the only true flaw in this extraordinary novel is that it ends all too soon. --Gisele Toueg

Customer Reviews One of the best books I've read in a long time This was an absolutely amazing book. I was captivated from the first page and could hardly put the book down reading the book in less than two days. One of the things that I loved most about the book was the complexity and development of the characters. I kept thinking that this had to be based on a true story, because all of the emotions (mine and the characters') seemed so real. I could not keep from crying when reading a couple of scenes in the book: One particularly was the scene of Hassaan in the alley after he found the kite. I loved the dichomotmies in the book loyalty vs. betrayal, rich vs.poor, love vs. hate, etc. For a book that was very profound in spirit and philosophy, it was so well written and easily understood. I was sad when I finished it. I highly recommend this book. The Kite Runner The Kite Runner is a first novel by Afghan American author Khaled Hosseini. Published in 2003, it tells the story of the friendship between Amir, a well-to-do Afghan boy from Kabul, and his closest childhood friend Hassan, the son of his father's Hazara servant. Their relationship is set against the tumultuous events from the fall of the monarchy in Afghanistan through the Soviet invasion, the mass exodus of refugees to Pakistan (and eventually the United States) and the Taliban regime. At the same time, it is the story of Amir's personal redemption as he finally succeeds in making amends with Hassan after he betrayed him years earlier. Amir and Hassan have an idyllic childhood in Kabul before Afghanistan was rocked by civil war, even though their friendship is marred by a master-servant relationship, and the fact that Amir feels his father is sometimes too fond of Hassan, even at his expense. One of the highlights of their friendship is their competition in the kite fighting competitions that mark the start of winter in Kabul. Amir is a master kite fighter, and Hassan is an uncanny "kite runner,' able to retrieve the fallen kites and bring them home as trophies. At twelve, Amir won the local kite fighting competition, winning his father's esteem at last. Hassan runs off to retrieve the kite, only to encounter Assef, a local bully, with whom he has had previous run-ins. Amir tries to find Hassan, only to watch at a distance as he is raped by Assef and his gang. He is ashamed that he did nothing to intervene, and their relationship deteriorates rapidly. Now he feels he must get rid of Hassan in order to overcome the guilt. He does this on the day after his thirteenth birthday, when he takes a watch and some money he has received as gifts and hides them under Hassan's mattress in the hut he shares with his father, Ali. Although he is innocent, Hassan admits to stealing them, in order to protect his friend from embarrassment. Ali announces that he and Hassan will leave the family's service and move to the remote Hazarajat, despite the protests and even tears of Amir's usually stoic father. Though Amir never sees Hassan again, he is constantly haunted by how he betrayed him. In 1980, Amir and his father leave Afghanistan for Peshawar in Pakistan, and eventually for the United States, to escape the new Soviet regime. Amir marries and embarks on a successful career as a novelist, but throughout all the years, he still feels that he betrayed Hassan by not coming to his aid. Fifteen years after Amir's father died, Amir receives a telephone call from his father's business partner, Rahim Khan, who is now living in Peshawar. He calls him back to Pakistan and tells him what happened to Hassan in the intervening years. Rahim Khan moved into the family's old house, and brought Hassan, his wife, and his infant son back to tend it. Ten years later, he and his wife are murdered by the Taliban. His son, Sohrab, was taken to an orphanage. Rahim Khan asks Amir to go back to Afghanistan to rescue Sohrab, but when he refuses, he tells him a dark family secret. Ali was sterile, and Amir's father was really Hassan's father too. Hassan was Amir's half-brother, and Sohrab is his nephew. Now Amir returns to Taliban-controlled Kabul to find Sohrab. He locates the orphanage and learns that the boy has been given to a Taliban official, who uses him as a sex slave. Amir locates the official and asks for Sohrab, only to find that the official, an executioner, is Assef, who raped Hassan twenty-five years earlier. They fight over the boy, and Amir is nearly killed, but Sohrab rescues him by shooting Assef in the eye with his slingshot. It is the culmination of a threat that Hassan had made years earlier, when Assef threatened him and Amir. Amir and Sohrab manage to escape to Pakistan, and Amir attempts to adopt Hassan. However, he meets with sharp opposition from the local American authorities. When Amir tells Sohrab that he may have to put him in an orphanage for a while, until he can arrange the paperwork, Sohrab attempts to commit suicide. Amir finds him in time, when he runs to tell him that his wife in the United States has found a way to bring the boy back to America. The book ends with Amir and Sohrab back in the United States, but it is only a partial victory. The pressures of the past few years have taken their toll on the boy, and he hasn't spoken a word in months. In the final scene, however, Amir thinks he noticed the briefest hint of a smile on Sohrab during a kite fighting competition by Afghan immigrants in San Francisco, after Amir uses one of Hassan's old tricks to down a rival kite This is a great debut by Khaled Hosseini. Very well written and and great story. Matt Furey loves this book & I respect that About 2 years ago, a book called "The Kite Runner" was published. It was a New York Times bestseller in hardcover and is a paperback bestseller now. I never heard of it. It's not that I don't read, or don't appreciate literature. I do and my library is hard to match in size. Naturally, I'm a believer in the Jim Rohn saying: "The difference between where you are today and where you'll be five years from now will be found in the quality of books you've read." Rohn also said that you'll instantly be able to tell how successful a person is by observing how big his library is compared to his tee-vee. Personally, I have four very large bookcases in my home filled. Have four very large ones at my office filled as well. And I have books and courses scattered all over Kingdom Come, including an ever-growing collection that I keep in China. Truth is, I have more books packed away in boxes than I have in my bookcases. And from time to time I like to make a few gratis recommendations. My brother Sean recently sent me "The Kite Runner" before I left for China, along with a biography of Alexander Hamilton. Now the Hamilton book looked like it might take some serious time to get through, so I decided to read a few pages of "The Kite Runner." 2 pages in I was hooked. That doesn't happen very often, and in fact, I can't remember being grabbed like that for a long time. 48 hours later I finished. The book was written by Khaled Hosseini, a native of Afghanistan. I'm not going to tell you what's in the book. There's nothing I hate more than knowing the end of a book or movie, or too much of the plot. I will tell you it's a tour de force, and you'll be a better person for reading it. When I finished reading very early in the morning, the sun was just coming up. I picked up a jump rope, headed out in back of the house here, and started doing a little interval routine found in Combat Conditioning - http://www.mattfurey.com/conditioning_book.html. I gotta say I worked up a helluva sweat. I've been doing a lot of rope jumping since I arrived in China; there's just something in the air here that lends itself to that kind of training. But it can be done anywhere. I'm also doing some stair sprinting (a close ally of hill sprints), and unlike Florida, there is no shortage of hills here on the island. My brother-in-law and I have plotted out a cruncher course for later in the week, the last hill being a monster. It's about 200 yards with about an 7% incline. (Don't try this at home unless you are already in very good shape.) Kick butt...take names, Matt Furey