Runner

I’ve been meaning to read this book for a while. But I kept pushing it aside, for something else. Well, at least until I signed up for Orbis Terrarum Challenge. You can say that the challenge has given a swift quick in the behind.

Here’s the blurb The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini(taken from Amazon.ca):

Amir 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. Both motherless, they grow up as close as brothers, but their fates, they know, are to be different. Amir’s father is a wealthy merchant; Hassan’s father is his manservant. Amir belongs to the ruling caste of Pashtuns, Hassan to the despised Hazaras.

This fragile idyll is broken by the mounting ethnic, religious, and political tensions that begin to tear Afghanistan apart. An unspeakable assault on Hassan by a gang of local boys tears the friends apart; Amir has witnessed his friend’s torment, but is too afraid to intercede. Plunged into self-loathing, Amir conspires to have Hassan and his father turned out of the household.

When the Soviets invade Afghanistan, Amir and his father flee to San Francisco, leaving Hassan and his father to a pitiless fate. 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.

Compelling, 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.

It always amazes me how certain books can bring me such deep emotions, not all books do, but this one brought me a gamut of emotions. While reading it I felt wonder, curiosity, happiness, sadness, fear, and anger. I cried and laughed. At the end of the book I was emotionally spent.

It was such a wonderful story! I loved the setting, albeit a sad one at times. I felt it’s magical essence through the boys eyes. The fun and the triumph of the kite competition. Amir confusion of emotions towards his father. I loved the boys friendship, and way Hassan protected Amir. I felt for both boys, Hassan for the act that was done to him and also for Amir that witnessed it and couldn’t help, and lived with that guilt throughout his life. And at the end Amir’s love for Hassan’s child and the need and want to help him.

I’m definitely getting a copy of this book for my keeper shelf. And I’ll also be looking for A Thousand Splendid Suns by the same author.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hussein (5/5) General Fiction; Published: Doubleday (2003); New Author; Favorite Read 2008; 100 + Reading Challenge (47); Orbis Terrarum Challenge (2); Library book; Added to shopping list;