The Kite Runner

Khaled Hosseini’s debut novel, The Kite Runner, was published in 2003, two years after the events of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the US invasion of Afghanistan. Hosseini, the son of a diplomat for the Afghan Foreign Ministry, was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, and relocated to France as a child. When Afghanistan was thrown into turmoil by the Soviet occupation at the height of the Cold War, Hosseini’s family was granted asylum in the United States and settled in San Jose, California. Decades later, upon reading that the Taliban had outlawed kite fighting in Afghanistan, Hosseini penned a short story he later expanded into the novel The Kite Runner. This study guide is based on the 2020 Kindle edition of the book.

In The Kite Runner, Hosseini uses his intimate knowledge of the culture, its customs, and its people to break down stereotypical depictions of Afghanistan in Western media. Framed as a story of fathers and sons, the novel explores the region’s turbulent history of ground wars following the fall of the monarchy through to the Taliban control, illustrating and defining the lives of Afghani people interrupted by war.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain depictions of racism, abuse, sexual assault, rape, human trafficking, and death by suicide.