![]() ![]() It is a relationship that haunts Amir from Kabul to California, where Amir and his father move after the Soviets invade Afghanistan. Amir's close but ambivalent friendship with - and lifelong shame regarding - his Hazara servant Hassan is at the heart of the book. The first novel published in English by an author from Afghanistan, "The Kite Runner" is the story of Amir, the young son of a well-to-do Afghan diplomat in 1970s Kabul. The book has served to bridge the cultural divide and surmount headlines with its story of a young boy contending with political and personal turmoil. "The Kite Runner," which became an international bestseller - translated into 40 languages, it has sold 8 million copies worldwide - helped fill in that very rudimentary picture. To a great extent, Americans had pictured Afghanistan as a land of cave-dwelling terrorists. It was the year many Americans first learned where Kabul, the country's capital, was and who the Taliban were. The times were cataclysmic, but for Hosseini, a practicing physician with an unpublished manuscript, the timing was propitious. Six months into his work on the book, the events of 9/11 occurred. In March 2001, Khaled Hosseini started writing "The Kite Runner," his semiautobiographical saga about coming of age in Afghanistan and coming to America after the Soviet invasion - and returning to Afghanistan after the rise of the Taliban. ![]()
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