The Sad Book Everyone Made You Read in Book Club

A kite, a alley, and the sentence that ruins a friendship

Here’s the setup, and I’m going to be careful with it because the whole book hinges on one afternoon you should experience cold. Amir is the son of a wealthy, larger-than-life man in 1970s Kabul. Hassan is the son of their servant, Ali, and Hassan is Amir’s closest friend, though Amir will spend the rest of the book arguing with himself about whether “friend” is even the right word, given the difference in their stations. Hassan is loyal in that way that breaks your heart a little because you know it’s not going to be reciprocated. He says he’d do anything for Amir. He means it.

Then there’s a kite-fighting tournament, the kind where boys cut each other’s kites out of the sky with glass-coated string, and Hassan is the best kite runner in the city, which means he can predict where a falling kite will land before it lands. He runs one down for Amir. And in the alley where he catches it, something happens to Hassan that Amir witnesses and does nothing about. He just watches. He’s a kid, he’s scared, but Hosseini doesn’t let you off easy on that excuse, and neither does Amir, forty years later, still gnawing on it.

That single choice, to look away, is the engine of the entire book. Everything after (the flight from Afghanistan when the Soviets invade, the immigrant life in Fremont, California, the marriage, the phone call that pulls Amir back to a country now run by the Taliban) is Amir trying to answer for that one afternoon. It’s a redemption story, but Hosseini is smart enough to make the redemption cost something.

Where it earns the tears, and where it leans on the scale

Look, the Kabul section is the best writing in the book, hands down. Hosseini grew up in Afghanistan before his family got out, and you can feel the difference between someone describing a place from research and someone describing a place they miss. The pomegranate tree Amir and Hassan carve their names into, the kite tournament itself, the way Baba commands a room just by being Baba. It’s specific in the way good fiction has to be specific. I read that whole first third in one sitting on a flight, the kind of flight where you’re annoyed the drink cart keeps interrupting you, and I remember looking up somewhere over, I think, Nebraska, faintly surprised that I was crying about a kite.

Here’s the thing though. The second half asks you to accept a coincidence so large it borders on soap opera, and I won’t spoil exactly what it is, but if you’ve read the book you know precisely the scene I mean, the one involving a name and a face that shouldn’t logically cross paths again but does, conveniently, right when the plot needs it to. I remember reading that part on my couch, going “oh, come on,” out loud, to no one. It’s the kind of plotting where you can feel Hosseini’s hand on the back of the story, pushing it where he needs it to go instead of trusting where it would naturally wander. A lot of readers don’t mind this. I mind it a little. The book earns so much of its emotion honestly that it’s frustrating when it also takes a shortcut.

And the villain, once he shows up in the back half, gets cartoonish in a way the rest of the book isn’t. Everyone else, even Baba, even Amir at his most cowardly, feels like a person contradicting himself. The villain mostly just needs to be evil enough to raise the stakes, and he does his job, but he’s the least interesting person in the book by a wide margin.

All that said. The Baba material, the father who is furious with his son for not being the kind of boy he expected, who redeems himself in tiny ways once they’re refugees together with nothing, that stuff is genuinely great, unsentimental in a way the more manipulative scenes aren’t. And the ending, the kite scene that mirrors the opening, “for you, a thousand times over,” gets me every single time regardless of how many times I’ve read it, regardless of how much I complain about the coincidence three chapters earlier. I’ve read this book three times now and I still don’t fully trust my own reaction to it. Maybe I’m just a sucker for redemption arcs. Maybe it’s genuinely that good and I’m overthinking the plumbing.

If you want your own copy to lend out and never see again, it’s here on Amazon.

For you, a thousand times over.

About Khaled Hosseini

Hosseini was born in Kabul in 1965, the son of a diplomat, and left Afghanistan as a kid right before everything fell apart, first for Paris, then for asylum in the United States when the Soviets invaded in 1979. He became a physician, was practicing internal medicine in California, and wrote The Kite Runner essentially on the side, before dawn, fitting it around hospital shifts. It became enormous almost by word of mouth, book clubs mostly, long before anyone was calling it a phenomenon. He eventually stopped practicing medicine to write full time and has since worked with the UN refugee agency, which tracks with how his fiction reads: like someone who left a place he loved and never fully stopped writing his way back into it.

If this wrecked you, read these next

• A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, his second novel, about two women in Afghanistan instead of two boys, and I’d argue it’s actually the stronger book, tighter plot, less convenient.
• A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, if you want the same scale of personal-tragedy-against-political-upheaval but set in India during the Emergency, and somehow even sadder.
• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, for the same one-terrible-choice-under-history’s-boot feeling, narrated by Death, which sounds gimmicky and isn’t.
• Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, if what you actually want is generational guilt and consequence stretched across decades and continents.

For your book club

1. Amir spends the whole book trying to atone for one moment of cowardice as a child. Do you think the ending actually earns him forgiveness, or is some of it just narrative convenience?
2. Baba tells Amir that theft is the only real sin, because every other sin is a variation of stealing something from someone. Does the book actually follow that logic through to the end?
3. Hassan says he’d do anything for Amir and means it completely. Why do you think Hosseini made their loyalty so lopsided, and does it hold up as a portrait of friendship or something closer to servitude dressed up as friendship?
4. How did you feel about the big coincidence in the second half? Did it break the spell for you or did the emotional stakes carry you past it?
5. The book was written by someone who left Afghanistan as a child. Does that distance show up anywhere in how the country itself is portrayed, before and after the Taliban?