1.1 The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini was published in 2003. Initially published by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin, The Kite Runner was said to be the first novel written in English by an Afghan writer, and the book appeared on many book club reading lists. The novel is set in Afghanistan from the late 1970s to 1981 and the start of the Soviet occupation, then in the Afghan community in Fremont, California from the 1980s to the early 2000s, and finally in contemporary Afghanistan during the Taliban regime. 

The Kite Runner is the story of strained family relationships between a father and a son, and between two brothers, how they deal with guilt and forgiveness, and how they weather the political and social transformations of Afghanistan from the 1970s to 2001. The Kite Runner opens in 2001. The adult narrator, Amir, lives in San Francisco and is contemplating his past, thinking about a boyhood friend whom he has betrayed. The action of the story then moves backward in time to the narrator’s early life in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he is the only child of a privileged merchant. Amir's closest friend is his playmate and servant Hassan, a poor illiterate boy who is a member of the Hazara ethnic minority. The Kite Runner, a coming-of-age novel, deals with the themes of identity, loyalty, courage, and deception. As the protagonist Amir grows to adulthood, he must come to terms with his past wrongs and adjust to a new culture after leaving Afghanistan for the United States. 

The novel sets the interpersonal drama of the characters against the backdrop of the modern history of Afghanistan, sketching the political and economic toll of the instability of various regimes in Afghanistan; from the end of the monarchy to the Soviet-backed government of the 1980s to the fundamentalist Taliban government of the 1990s. The action closes soon after the fall of the Taliban and alludes to the rise of Hamid Karzai as leader of a new Afghan government in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001.

The Kite Runner is a novel about friendship, betrayal, and the price of loyalty. It is about bonds between fathers and sons, and the power of their lies. Written against a history that has not been told in fiction before, The Kite Runner describes the rich culture and beauty of a land in the process of being destroyed. But with the devastation, Khaled Hosseini also gives us hope: through the novel’s faith in the power of reading and storytelling, and in the possibilities he shows for redemption.

1.2 Khaled Hosseini

Khaled Hosseini is one of the most widely read and beloved novelists in the world, with more than ten million copies of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns sold in the United States, and more than thirty-eight million copies sold worldwide in more than seventy countries. His third novel, And the Mountains Echoed, is published May 21, 2013. Hosseini is also a Goodwill Envoy to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the UN Refugee Agency, and the founder of The Khaled Hosseini Foundation, a nonprofit that provides humanitarian assistance to the people of Afghanistan.

Hosseini published several stories before writing his first novel, The Kite Runner, which was based on an earlier short story of the same title. As a doctor with an active practice and many patients, Hosseini struggled to find time to expand the story, so he wrote the novel piecemeal in the early morning hours. Hosseini contends that treating patients made him a keen observer of people and the ways they express themselves, both verbally and nonverbally.

In 2004, Hosseini was selected by the Young Adult Library Services Association to receive an Alex Award, an honor given to the authors of the ten best adult books for teenagers published in the previous year. Also in 2004, he was given the Original Voices award by the Borders Group, and The Kite Runner was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.,源^自#751\文-论|文]网}www.751com.cn 文学伦理学视阈下的《追风筝的人》(2):http://www.751com.cn/yingyu/lunwen_51422.html