The Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini
Summary
Amir grows up privileged in 1970s Kabul alongside Hassan, the son of his father's Hazara servant Ali, and the two boys are inseparable until the day Amir wins the neighborhood's biggest kite fighting tournament and Hassan runs to retrieve the winning kite for him. Amir arrives in time to see Hassan assaulted in an alley by an older boy named Assef and does nothing, then compounds the betrayal by planting a watch in Hassan's room to have him accused of theft and driven away with his father. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Amir and his own father flee to Pakistan and then to Fremont, California, where Amir grows up among immigrant flea markets, becomes a novelist, and marries a fellow Afghan refugee named Soraya. Years later a call from his father's dying friend Rahim Khan pulls him back toward the past: Hassan, Rahim reveals, was actually Amir's own half brother, and Hassan was later murdered by the Taliban, leaving a son, Sohrab, in a Kabul orphanage. Amir returns to Taliban controlled Afghanistan to find the boy and discovers the orphanage's buyer is Assef, now a Taliban official; Amir is badly beaten before Sohrab uses the same slingshot Hassan once carried to blind Assef and free them both. Getting Sohrab to America takes a bureaucratic struggle and survives a suicide attempt by the boy, and the novel ends with Amir running a kite for a still silent, traumatized Sohrab in a California park, repeating Hassan's own words from decades earlier.
Hosseini writes plainly and moves quickly, trusting the plot's coincidences to carry real emotional weight rather than undercutting them with irony, and the book reads as a fast, accessible introduction to Afghan history for readers who had never encountered it in fiction before. Its critics point to exactly that accessibility as a weakness, arguing the later chapters resolve Amir's guilt too neatly for what came before.
Historical Context & Significance
The Kite Runner won South Africa's Boeke Prize in 2004 and was named a 2004 Alex Award winner by the American Library Association, honoring adult books with strong teen appeal, along with the United Kingdom's Penguin/Orange Reading Group Prize, all readers' and retail honors rather than a major juried literary prize. The 2003 National Book Award for fiction went instead to Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire, and Hosseini's debut has never won a Pulitzer or a National Book Award.
None of that slowed its reach: the novel spent two years on the New York Times bestseller list beginning in 2005 and has sold more than seven million copies in the United States alone. It has also drawn sustained controversy, challenged and banned in several American school districts over its language, sexual content and violence, and named by the American Library Association among the most challenged books of 2008, and criticized by some Afghan and Hazara readers for flattening real ethnic tension in Afghanistan into a plot device. That same film forced Paramount to relocate its child actors out of Afghanistan after threats tied to the assault scene.