"The Kite Runner", Khaled Hosseini

The blurb on the cover says it all, "All the great themes of literature and of life are the fabric of this extraordinary novel: love, honor, guilt, fear, redemption."

That's what the book is about really - human relationships, their frailties and their redemption. It is a very touching father and son story that leaves an impression for a long time. For the more discerning reader, however, the book holds more than a mere emotional saga - it also tells the story of modern day Afghanistan - a land ripped apart by civil war.

The story begins in Kabul, the vibrant hometown of twelve year old Amir Jan, and Hassan Ali, his unflinching loyal friend and servant. As our shy and romantic protagonist, Amir, clambers through a bittersweet childhood, his life is gradually torn apart by conflicts from both within and without. Days before his thirteenth birthday, Amir's inner peace is disturbed forever when he betrays his friend Hassan. Soon later, his external peace too is shattered when the Russian invasion forces the father and son to flee from Afghanistan to Pakistan. Overnight, the war reduces them from rich aristocratic Afghans leading a comfortable life to scampering refugees with nothing to live for but their pride. Amir and his dad eventually migrate to America and start a new life as struggling immigrants on the periphery of subsistence.

The second half of the book traces Amir's arduous trek back to normalcy and respectability in his new homeland. Much later in life, a sequence of events forces Amir to return to Afghanistan in a quest for redemption for his past sins. What follows is a haunting description of how extreme fundamentalism, apathy and a senseless war have reduced a once proud and flourishing nation into a heap of rubble. It's not just the land that is broken, but also its people. They've lost their pride and with it their hope.

The entire narrative provides glimpses of the physical, emotional and psychological traumas of being a refugee. It also seeks to sensitize the world to the harsh ground realities of Afghanistan. As the author says in one of the passages, the war has made Massar-e-sharief, Kabul and Bamiyan household names across the world, yet no one really knows anything about these places and its people beyond the images beamed on TV. "The Kite Runner" breathes life into these cities and its people. It narrates the tale of how war has maimed these once bustling centers of culture and life, and converted them into graveyards filled with deprivation, death and hopelessness.

Note on the Author: Khaled Hosseini is a pracitising doctor in the US. His family left Afghanistan in 1976, just before the outbreak of the civil war. Khaled was 11 years old then. Though the novel derives strongly from his experiences, it is not strictly autobiographical. For more on the author you may refer to the following link, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaled_Hosseini.