Khaled Hosseini
I just watched the film for the book a few days ago and I was reminded of how dreadfully disheartened I was reading this book. While there is redemption and hope, mostly there is a full-plate serving of sadness reading The Kite Runner. – Not that that should put any off reading it; life is sometimes sad and this story beautifully told.
As I had read this quite a number of years ago now, when it first came out on the bestseller list, I was intrigued to see what Ann Morgan had come up with for her Afghan entry. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she had a hard time escaping the ubiquitousness of Hosseini in Afghani writing. Despite a native narrative tradition stretching back a thousand years, and a daily presence in news stories for more than a decade, Afghanistan has always been something of literary hermit kingdom. With the success of Hosseini's writing, hopefully more avenues will open for new Afghan writers to emerge in the future.
