“His passionate story of betrayal and redemption is framed by Afghanistan’s tragic recent past. “In The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini gives us a vivid and engaging story that reminds us how long his people have been struggling to triumph over the forces of violence-forces that continue to threaten them even today.” -New York Times It is rare that a book is at once so timely and of such high literary quality.” -Publishers Weekly an incisive, perceptive examination of recent Afghan history. It is so powerful that for a long time everything I read after seemed bland.” -Isabel Allende All the great themes of literature and of life are the fabric of this extraordinary novel: love, honor, guilt, fear redemption. This is one of those unforgettable stories that stay with you for years.

Only years later will Amir have an opportunity to redeem himself by returning to Afghanistan to begin to repay the debt long owed to the man who should have been his brother.Ĭompelling, heartrending and etched with details of a history never before told in fiction, The Kite Runner is a story of the ways in which we’re damned by our moral failures, and of the extravagant cost of redemption. An unspeakable assault on Hassan by a gang of local boys tears the friends apart and when the Soviets invade Afghanistan, Amir and his father flee to San Francisco, leaving Hassan and his father to a pitiless fate.

This fragile idyll is broken by the mounting ethnic, religious and political tensions that begin to divide Afghanistan further. Amir belongs to the ruling caste of Pashtuns, Hassan to the despised Hazaras. Amir’s father is a wealthy merchant Hassan’s father is his manservant. Both motherless, they grow up as close as brothers, but their fates are to be different. This past weekend in advance of Feltrinelli’s new publication, the prestigious Corriere della Sera, an Italian daily newspaper published in Milan, shared an excerpt of Khaled Hosseini’s new amazing foreword for the 20th anniversary edition, in an impressive 2-page piece spread, which you can see here:Īmir and Hassan are childhood friends in the alleys and orchards of Kabul in the sunny days before the invasion of the Soviet army and Afghanistan’s decent into fanaticism. Now with over 10 million copies sold worldwide THE KITE RUNNER is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a new Preface from the author and a stunning new Italian edition, which is the first of a slate of anticipated new 20th anniversary editions for THE KITE RUNNER! In the first two years of THE KITE RUNNER’S publication in the United States, over one million paperback copies were sold. Congratulations on the Italian publication of the new 20th anniversary edition of THE KITE RUNNER from Feltrinelli by global bestseller Khaled Hosseini!

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini