The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini • 2003
Devastation Rating
Afghanistan guilt friendship immigration
Our Take
Amir watched Hassan get raped in an alleyway and did nothing, and the rest of the novel is the cost of that watching. Hosseini sets the betrayal against Afghanistan's destruction — the Soviet invasion, the Taliban, the refugee diaspora — so that Amir's private guilt and his country's public catastrophe illuminate each other.
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