The Kite Runner

Khaled Hosseini’s first novel follows Amir, the son of a wealthy Kabul merchant, and Hassan, the son of his father’s servant, from their childhood in pre-Soviet Afghanistan through the Soviet invasion, exile in the United States, and a return to a country under Taliban rule.

The story turns on a single act of cowardice during a kite-fighting tournament and on the decades Amir spends trying to atone for it. Along the way it covers friendship, class and ethnic division, fatherhood, and the long reach of guilt.