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This novel deals with events in Kabul, Afghanistan, between 1975, when the first person narrator Amir, from a wealthy and socially privileged Shiite Pashtun family, was twelve years old, until the spring of 2002, the supposed time of this narration. Amir, now a successful writer, reflects on his close boyhood friendship with Hassan, the son of a valued family servant and a member of the largely disenfranchised Sunni Hazara ethnic group. The devoted Hassan served as Amir’s kite-runner; that is, he retrieved the kites that Amir defeated in the annual contests. Amid the political turmoil in Afghanistan that led to the assassination of Daoud Khan in 1978 and the subsequent war with the Soviet Union, Amir and his father Baba escape to the United States. Part of the novel concerns their difficult adjustment to life in San Francisco and Amir’s marriage to a fellow Afghan émigré. But most of the action occurs in Afghanistan, first when Amir and Hassan are growing up, and later when Amir returns to Afghanistan under the Taliban rule to rescue Hassan’s son, Sohrab. The Kite Runner is both “beautifully written,” as various reviewers have observed, and “gripping.” The images of Afghanistan are vivid and memorable, and the shaping of the plot, with its theme of betrayal and personal redemption, constitutes, as one reviewer has noted, “a haunting morality tale.”

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*Cover reprinted with permission from Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Author Information

Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1965; his father was employed in the Foreign Ministry and his mother taught in a girls’ high school. As a boy he read literature in Farsi (Persian) and taught a Hazara servant to read and write, somewhat as Amir does Hassan in The Kite Runner. In 1976, after Daoud Khan took power in a bloodless coup, Hosseini’s father moved the family to Paris, and after the Communists took power the family moved to San Jose, California, in 1980 at first subsisting, as Amir and his father do in the novel, on welfare and food stamps. After graduating from high school in San Jose, Hosseini received his bachelor’s degree in biology from Santa Clara University in 1988 and his M.D. from the University of California at San Diego in 1993, practicing medicine until after the success of The Kite Runner, his first novel, in 2003. Early reviews of his second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007), which also takes place in Afghanistan, have been strong. Movie rights to both novels have already been acquired, and the movie of The Kite Runner is slated for release in the fall of 2007. About a year after his first novel was published, Hosseini visited Afghanistan for the first time in 27 years. Hosseini is married and the father of a son and daughter.

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*Photo reprinted with permission from Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Discussion Questions

1. In an interview concerning The Kite Runner Hosseini says he wanted readers to see how Afghanistan was before the war with the Soviet Union and the rise of the Taliban and to get some sense of the collision of “various ethnicities” in his native land. Can you follow the historical events fairly well in this novel? If not, you might want to look up some sites on the internet. What do you make of the ethnic tensions, particularly between the Pashtuns and the Hazaras?

2. Hosseini also indicates that he was “brought up on a tradition of storytelling.” What evidence do you see of his love of storytelling in this novel? Do you think this sort of tradition is common in the United States today, or is it being usurped by television and other media? Is yours a storytelling family?

3. Eventually we discover that Amir and Hassan are half-brothers. Were you surprised to learn this, or did you think Hosseini was intimating as much all the way? Do you find that element of the plot, and perhaps other episodes as well, to be credible, or does that sort of thing strike you as exotic, something from the "Tales of the Arabian Nights"?

4. One obvious reason for the very positive response to this novel involves the time and setting: it comes at a time when Western readers are eager to learn something about recent events in Afghan history and about the people and culture. What do you think you have learned along that line from your reading of this novel? Do you think this sort of novel is a fairly reliable source of that kind of information?

5. In one of Amir’s early conversations with the woman who will become his wife, Soraya says, “Sad stories make good books” (147). Does this rather simple statement seem valid to you? Does it apply to this novel? Can it be equally said that “happy stories make good books”? Why do you think so much of what is presented as Great Literature is, as Soraya might say, “sad”?

6. The Kite Runner might be described as a novel about loyalty and betrayal. What sorts of loyalty and betrayal(s) are involved? Does Hosseini seem to suggest that betrayal can be made right? Do you the virtue of loyalty is more important in some cultures than in others?