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

The Number 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith

This first novel in Alexander McCall Smith's widely acclaimed The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series tells the story of the delightfully cunning and enormously engaging Precious Ramotswe, who is drawn to her profession to "help people with problems in their lives.” 

A Look Inside Gaborone

The Republic of Botswana is situated in Southern Africa, nestled between South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Zambia.  Botswana is the largest exporter of gemstone diamonds in the world.

Gaborone, the capital, is by far the most important city in Botswana. 

Gaborone is a young city with nearly a quarter of a million inhabitants. It scarcely existed in the 19th century before Chief Gaborone moved his Batlokwa tribe into the area from the Magaliesburg Mountains in the early 1880s. He settled in the Tlokweng area on the Notwane river. 

In 1966 Gaborone became the capital of newly independent Botswana. Two decades later, in 1986, it was declared a city. Today, stimulated by the discovery of diamonds and the rising wealth of the nation, Gaborone has become one of the fastest growing cities in the world, while still preserving its offbeat rural charm. ~website

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village--will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future. ~review

About the Author

Born in Bombay in 1952, Rohinton Mistry immigrated to Canada in 1975.  He began writing stories in 1983 while attending the University of Toronto.   Rohinton Mistry's first novel, Such a Long Journey, creates a vivid picture of Indian family life and culture as well as tells a story rich in subject matter, characterization and symbolism. It is set in 1971 Bombay, when India went to war over what was later to become Bangladesh.  Such a Long Journey was made into a movie in 2000, starring Om Puri and Roshan Seth. 

A Fine Balance won the L.A. Times Book Award for Fiction, the Commonwealth Writer's Prize, Canada's prestigious Giller Prize and was a 1996 Booker Prize Finalist.

A Look Inside Bombay

India is known as the home of the vasectomy, with the Indian government claiming to have performed the most amount of vasectomies, than any other nation. In 1973 over 7 million vasectomies were performed in India due to cash initiative schemes. In the Gorakhpur vasectomy camp in India in 1972 there were at least fourteen cases of tetanus infection. This led to the first reported deaths due to vasectomy - eight of them were described in the Times of India. ~website

The train stations in Bombay are crowded…One needs to be physically fit to do the daily commute by train. People travel hanging out of trains, sitting on top of trains, and there are casualties every day." 

The problem of homelessness is worse now than in 1975, because the population has almost doubled. There must be twice as many people living on pavements, in slums and in rudimentary dwellings.

The Little Children by Tom Perotta

Tom Perrotta's thirty-ish parents of young children are a varied and surprising bunch. There's Todd, the handsome stay-at-home dad dubbed "The Prom King" by the moms of the playground; Sarah, a lapsed feminist with a bisexual past, who seems to have stumbled into a traditional marriage; Richard, Sarah's husband, who has found himself more and more involved with a fantasy life on the internet than with the flesh and blood in his own house; and Mary Ann, who thinks she has it all figured out, down to scheduling a weekly roll in the hay with her husband, every Tuesday at 9pm. They all raise their kids in the kind of sleepy American suburb where nothing ever seems to happen-at least until one eventful summer, when a convicted child molester moves back to town, and two restless parents begin an affair that goes further than either of them could have imagined. Unexpectedly suspenseful, but written with all the fluency and dark humor of Perrotta's previous novels, Little Children exposes the adult dramas unfolding amidst the swingsets and slides of an ordinary American playground.  ~review

About the Author

Tom Perrotta is a novelist and short story writer whose work explores the adolescent experience.  Perrotta grew up in New Jersey and currently lives outside Boston. He received his B.A. in English from Yale University and his M.A. in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. He has taught writing at Yale University and Harvard University.  He is also the author of Joe College and Election: A Novel, a satirical, funny story about a suburban New Jersey high school election gone haywire that became an acclaimed Paramount movie starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon.  

-A remarkably astute observer of youth culture, Perrotta has been called "a writer to watch" by The Washington Times.