Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner

A few weeks after finishing The Kite Runner, I still get chills remebering one line: "For you, a thousand times over." It is spoken by the narrator, Amir, to his newly adopted son at the end of the novel. The two of them have just won an Afghan style kite tournament by cutting the string of the rival kite and setting it adrift. "Do you want me to run that kite for you?" Amir asks his son. "Running" a kite means retrieving it as a trophy. The son nods. That's when Amir says these words to his son--"For you, a thousand times over"

When he was a boy, Amir had often heard these words from Hassan, his childhood friend and the son of his father's Hazara servant. Hassan would say them to Amir when performing one or another menial task for him--or when Amir would ask him to run a kite: "For you, a thousand times over." Even despite the two boys' seemingly vast differences of class and race, Hassan's words carried enormous love and loyalty.

But this story is about more than Hassan's devotion to Amir. It is also about Amir's cruel betrayal of Hassan. The guilt from that betrayal haunts Amir--comes to govern his life, really--and is finally purged only at great cost in one explosive scene.

Eventually, Hassan is murdered by Taliban thugs, Amir adopts his son, bringing him home to California where he shows him the same love he himself had received from Hassan. "For you, a thousand times over," Amir says to the boy just before running the kite, then adds:

I ran, a grown man running with swarms of screaming children. But I didn't care. I ran with the wind blowing in my face, and a smile as wide as the Valley of Panjsher on my lips.
I ran.

Amir's memories of his childhood friend have taught him how to love. Amir is now the kite runner. This story of redemption makes me want to love more fully as well--the highest praise I can give any book.