The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1965. He is the oldest of five children. His father worked for the Afghan foreign ministry and his mother was a teacher of Farsi and History at a large girls high school in Kabul. In 1976, Khaled’s family was relocated to Paris, France, where his father was assigned a diplomatic post in the Afghan embassy. The assignment would return the Hosseini family in 1980, but by then Afghanistan had already witnessed a bloody communist coup and the Soviet invasion. Khaled’s family, instead, asked for and was granted political asylum in the U.S. He has been in practice as an internist since 1996. He is married, has two children (a boy and a girl, Haris and Farah). The Kite Runner is his first novel. ~authors website

About Afghanistan 

Afghanistan is a mountainous landlocked country, about the size of Texas, located in Central Asia. Wedged between the former Soviet Union, Iran, Pakistan and China, it has been an area of tension for hundreds of years.  Afghanistan achieved a measure of national unity in 1747 and became a constitutional monarchy in 1931. In 1973 the monarchy was overthrown in a bloodless coup, and a republic was established. The republic failed to survive and in late December of 1979 thousands of Soviet troops air lifted into the country. The war against the Soviets lasted many years, before the cease-fire just a few years ago.

Interview with the Author