THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER ‘Devastating’ Daily Telegraph ‘Heartbreaking’ The Times ‘Unforgettable’ Isabel Allende ‘Haunting’ Independent Afghanistan, 1975: Twelve-year-old Amir is desperate to win the local kite-fighting tournament and his loyal friend Hassan promises to help him. But neither of the boys can foresee what will happen to Hassan that afternoon, an event that is to shatter their lives. After the Russians invade and the family is forced to flee to America, Amir realises that one day he must return to Afghanistan under Taliban rule to find the one thing that his new world cannot grant him: redemption.
Hosseini, Khaled: - Khaled Hosseini is one of the most widely read and beloved novelists in the world, with over thirty eight million copies of his books sold in more than seventy countries. The Kite Runner was a major film and was a Book of the Decade, chosen by The Times, Daily Telegraph and Guardian. A Thousand Splendid Suns was the Richard & Judy Best Read of the Year in 2008. And the Mountains Echoed was chosen for the Richard & Judy Summer Book Club in 2014, and readers voted it as their favourite of all the titles. 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 not-for-profit organisation which provides humanitarian assistance to the people of Afghanistan. He was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, and lives in northern California.
Spangler, Matthew: - Matthew Spangler is a playwright, director, and professor of Performance Studies based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His adaptation of Khaled Hosseini's novel The Kite Runner received five San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics' Circle Awards including Best Original Script. His other plays include Tortilla Curtain, adapted from the novel by T.C. Boyle, which received an Edgerton Foundation New American Play Award, as well as being a finalist for the San Diego Theatre Critics' Circle Award for Best New Play; Albatross based on the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which received Boston's Elliot Norton Theatre Awards for Outstanding Production by a Small Theatre and Outstanding Solo Performance. Other works include one-person shows of James Joyce's Dubliners and Finnegans Wake; A Paradise It Seems, an adaptation of John Cheever's short stories; Mozart!, a musical theatre adaptation of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's letters; as well as stage adaptations of John Steinbeck's fiction; Ernest Hemingway's short stories; Clyde Edgerton's Where Trouble Sleeps; and Thomas Wolfe's The Lost Boy. He has also written articles on the adaptation of literature for the stage, Irish theatre, and intercultural theatre that have appeared in numerous journals and books. His book Staging Intercultural Ireland: New Plays and Practitioner Perspectives (co-edited with Charlotte McIvor) was published by Cork University Press in 2014. Matthew Spangler is Professor of Performance Studies at San José State University in California.
