About the Book

Summary

Amir, the son of a successful Pashtun businessman, lives a comfortable life in Kabul, Afghanistan in the early 1970s.  His best friend is Hassan, a year younger and the son of a servant, who is like a brother to Amir but still a member of the despised Hazara minority (descendants of the Mongols and Shi'a Muslims).  The boys' favorite sport is kite fighting, which takes place every winter.  Amir competes in the contest where boys use razor-sharp kite lines to sever one another's lines, and Hassan is the best in the city at running and retrieving fallen kites.

The two boys reach a turning point in 1975 when the neighborhood bully Assef savages Hassan (after the servant boy had defended Amir from the bullies) and Amir does nothing.  The guilt for that betrayal, as well as Amir's troubled relationship with his father Baba, will rule his life for the next 20 years.

The Russian army invades Afghanistan and drives Amir's family over the border to Pakistan.  Eventually they make their way to Fremont, California to make a new life.  But in December of 2001 a phone call out of the past summons Amir back to Pakistan, and then Kabul itself, now under the crushing rule of the Taliban, to discover long-buried secrets and make amends with his guilty conscience.

Excerpt from The Kite Runner

I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975.  I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek.  That was a long time ago, but it's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it.  Because the past claws its way out.  Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.

One day last summer, my friend Rahim Khan called from Pakistan.  He asked me to come see him.  Standing in the kitchen with the receiver to my ear, I knew it wasn't just Rahim Khan on the line.  It was my past of unatoned sins.  After I hung up, I went for a walk along Spreckels Lake on the northern edge of Golden Gate Park.  The early-afternoon sun sparkled on the water where dozens of miniature boats sailed, propelled by a crisp breeze.  Then I glanced up and saw a pair of kites, red with long blue tails, soaring in the sky.  They danced high above the trees on the west end of the park, over the windmills, floating side by side like a pair of eyes looking down on San Francisco, the city I now call home.  And suddenly Hassan's voice whispered in my head: For you, a thousand times over.  Hassan the harelipped kite runner.

I sat on a park bench near a willow tree. I thought about something Rahim Khan said just before he hung up, almost as an afterthought.  There is a way to be good again.  I looked up at those twin kites.  I thought about Hassan.  Thought about Baba.  Ali.  Kabul.  I thought of the life I had lived until the winter of 1975 came along and changed everything.  And made me what I am today...