Contextual Kite Runner

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KhaKhaled Hosseini Khaled Hosseini was born in Afghanistan and was the oldest of five children. He spent the first years of his childhood in Kabul. His family lived in the affluent Wazir Akbar Khan district of the city, in a cultivated, cosmopolitan atmosphere, where women lived and worked as equals with men. His father worked for the foreign ministry, while his mother taught Persian literature, and Khaled grew up loving the treasures of classical Persian poetry. His imagination was also fired by movies from India and the USA, and he enjoyed the sport of kite fighting he portrayed so vividly in The Kite Runner. Hosseini was born in Kabul in 1965, the first child of his diplomat father and teacher mother. Nila came, he says, from the kind of parties he remembers his parents throwing while he was a teenager in the 70s, when a certain stratum of Kabul's middle class was undergoing Westernisation. "There would be really striking women in short skirts," he recalls. "Beautiful, very outspoken, temperamental, endlessly – in my young mind – interesting. Drinking freely, smoking. Nila is a creation from my memory of that kind of woman from that time and that place." It was, however, a place that he left when he was just 11 years old. His father's work took them to Paris, and then, when the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan prevented them from returning home, they sought political asylum in the United States and settled in California. Hosseini, aged 15, was plunged into a San Jose high school, speaking no English. Hosseini's first novel came out in 2003 and has since been published in 70 countries. It tells the story of Amir, a young boy from the Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul, whose closest friend is Hassan, his father's young Hazara servant. Their story is told against a backdrop of key events, such as the fall of Afghanistan's monarchy, the Soviet invasion, the

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