THE KITE RUNNER by Khaled Hosseini

This is taken from Amazon.co.uk about the book currently reading.

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 the Hardcover edition.