Amazon.co.uk Review
The Kite Runner of Khaled Hosseini's deeply moving fiction debut is an illiterate Afghan boy with an uncanny instinct for predicting exactly where a downed kite will land. Growing up in the city of Kabul in the early 1970s, Hassan was narrator Amir's closest friend even though the loyal 11-year-old with "a face like a Chinese doll" was the son of Amir's father's servant and a member of Afghanistan's despised Hazara minority. But in 1975, on the day of Kabul's annual kite-fighting tournament, something unspeakable happened between the two boys.

Narrated by Amir, a 40-year-old novelist living in California, The Kite Runner tells the gripping story of a boyhood friendship destroyed by jealousy, fear, and the kind of ruthless evil that transcends mere politics. Running parallel to this personal narrative of loss and redemption is the story of modern Afghanistan and of Amir's equally guilt-ridden relationship with the war-torn city of his birth. The first Afghan novel to be written in English, The Kite Runner begins in the final days of King Zahir Shah's 40-year reign and traces the country's fall from a secluded oasis to a tank-strewn battlefield controlled by the Russians and then the trigger-happy Taliban. When Amir returns to Kabul to rescue Hassan's orphaned child, the personal and the political get tangled together in a plot that is as suspenseful as it is taut with feeling.

The son of an Afghan diplomat whose family received political asylum in the United States in 1980, Hosseini combines the unflinching realism of a war correspondent with the satisfying emotional pull of master storytellers such as Rohinton Mistry. Like the kite that is its central image, the story line of this mesmerizing first novel occasionally dips and seems almost to dive to the ground. But Hosseini ultimately keeps everything airborne until his heartrending conclusion in an American picnic park. --Lisa Alward, Amazon.ca --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Holiday Gift Giving Surprsie for fellow Bookcrosser!

Thank you very much for this book from my wishlist! I also received a copy of it from the recent Australian Bookcrossing convention but I plan to read your copy and send the other copy onto another bookcrosser from the wishlist thread.
Thank you again for your generosity!

Thank you sobergirl for sharing this extraordinary book with me. I found this site http://faculty.mdc.edu/dmcguirk/AGoodRead/ForeignTerms/ForeignTerms.htm useful as I have never read anything about Afghanistan before. I stayed up for hours last night to finish reading this book.
I have plans for this book!

Picked this book up at the Brisbane Bookcrossing Meetup.

I have already read this book and really liked it. As I have already read it I am thinking I will forward it on to someone else.

RELEASE NOTES:

Released to another bookcrosser.

Absolutely loved this book. Look forward to more by this author

RELEASE NOTES:

Left on a seat near Bob Deans Fields off Deans Avenue

I found this book sitting, with two of its friends, on a lonely park bench in Hagley park, Christchurch. I had heard about Bookcrossing before and was excited to find one. What an excellent concept.
Today I sent it back on its journey...
I left it on a seat next to a maori statue at check in, at rotorua airport nz, ready for its new Temporary home.
27.06.08

RELEASE NOTES:

On seat near green maori statue in check-in lounge