12歲的阿富汗男孩阿米爾，家境富裕，但出生時母親就難產而死。他總是想討父親的歡心，於是決定參加當地的放風箏比賽，希望藉此向父親證明自己的男子氣概。他的死忠僕人兼好友哈山答應助他一臂之力。哈山是父親的僕人之子，同樣從小沒有母親，年齡相仿的兩人一起長大，情同兄弟，只是哈山屬僕人階層，不識字，常被鄰居欺負。 然而，風箏比賽那天下午哈山所遭遇的暴力事件，粉碎了兩人之間的情誼，也從此改變了兩人的人生。蘇聯入侵阿富汗之後，阿米爾一家逃往美國，雖然經過多年後，阿米爾已成家立業，但仍非常愧疚，無法原諒自己當年對哈山的背叛與懦弱。為了贖罪，阿米爾終於再度踏上暌違二十多年的故鄉，希望能為不幸的哈山盡一點心力。
本書為電影封面版，《追風箏的孩子》已改編為同名電影，美國上映預計為2007年11月。
The Kite Runner of Khaled Hosseini’s deeply moving fiction debut is an illiterate Afghan boy with an uncanny instinct for predicting exactly where a downed kite will land. Growing up in the city of Kabul in the early 1970s, Hassan was narrator Amir’s closest friend even though the loyal 11-year-old with ”a face like a Chinese doll” was the son of Amir’s father’s servant and a member of Afghanistan’s despised Hazara minority. But in 1975, on the day of Kabul’s annual kite-fighting tournament, something unspeakable happened between the two boys.
Narrated by Amir, a 40-year-old novelist living in California, The Kite Runner tells the gripping story of a boyhood friendship destroyed by jealousy, fear, and the kind of ruthless evil that transcends mere politics. Running parallel to this personal narrative of loss and redemption is the story of modern Afghanistan and of Amir’s equally guilt-ridden relationship with the war-torn city of his birth. The first Afghan novel to be written in English, The Kite Runner begins in the final days of King Zahir Shah’s 40-year reign and traces the country’s fall from a secluded oasis to a tank-strewn battlefield controlled by the Russians and then the trigger-happy Taliban. When Amir returns to Kabul to rescue Hassan’s orphaned child, the personal and the political get tangled together in a plot that is as suspenseful as it is taut with feeling.
The son of an Afghan diplomat whose family received political asylum in the United States in 1980, Hosseini combines the unflinching realism of a war correspondent with the satisfying emotional pull of master storytellers such as Rohinton Mistry. Like the kite that is its central image, the story line of this mesmerizing first novel occasionally dips and seems almost to dive to the ground. But Hosseini ultimately keeps everything airborne until his heartrending conclusion in an American picnic park.
