“ With me as the glaring exception, my father molded the world around him to his liking. He had a knack for proving people wrong when it came to people judging him. Baba had an appetite for grandeur - he made everything with his heart in it, and consequently, he made it grand. Sometimes, Amir wished that Baba didn’t do that, he wanted to have a privilege of being Baba’s son, Hassan was a servant’s son, no matter if the servant and his generations had served their family. Sometimes, Amir would be jealous of him.īaba treated the two equally, well, as much as he could. Hassan was illiterate in books, but abundantly rich in everything else - courage, faithfulness, compassion, positivity, guilelessness. He had a mind for literature, something that he inherited from his mother. ” This bond is tested time and again throughout the book.Īmir was timid and soft in tastes. Ali used to say that “ there was a brotherhood between people who had fed from the same breast, a kinship that not even time could break. Hassan and Amir were fed from the same breast. Hassan’s mother ran away with a gang of singers one week after she gave birth to him. They had a Hazara servant family, Ali, and later, his son Hassan. Baba lost his beloved wife when she was giving birth to Amir, which Amir thinks to be the reason why Baba tends to hate him, sometimes. This one, however, is a little different.Īmir grew up in Afghanistan, growing up under the towering and stoic presence of his father (whom he called ‘Baba’ and that is what we would also call him), a self-made man, bent on shaping the world the way he wanted. Since then, he has written 2 other major Novels, ‘ A Thousand Splendid Suns ’ and ‘ And the Mountains echoed ’, each of which has earned worldwide acclaim. It was this book which broke Khaled Hosseini’s ‘arranged marriage ’ with his medical profession he consequently moved in permanently with his ‘mistress’ - writing, to become a full time writer.

‘The Kite Runner’, is the story of Amir, and of Hassan.

I read the book after having read the others, in a reverse chronological order.

The kite runner book cover