Khaled Hosseini's novel, The Kite Runner, takes place amid the backdrop of these unfolding events. In the beginning, Ali, the son of a wealthy businessman in Kabul, and his friend Hassan, who lives and works as a servant on the estate, lead an idyllic existence. They play, climb trees, tell stories and despite their differences in status and religion--Hassan is a shia--establish a kinship that goes much deeper than master and servant. At the same time, Ali is distressed because he can never please his father--an imposing figure of enormous stature, given to wresting bears and performing impressive feats of philanthropy--while his father inexplicably shines his light on Hassan, the servant boy with the disfiguring harelip. The father's unfairness fuels enormous resentment; ultimately, it leads Ali to betray Hassan in a terrible--and, to Ali's mind, unforgivable--way.

The remainder of the book deals with the events leading up to Ali's redemption. First, however, his father loses everything when the Russians invade Afghanistan, and they both manage to escape and build a new life in San Francisco. While not the life of wealth and grandeur his lived in Kabul, Ali, if not his father, is content in his new home. But, many years later, events conspire to bring him back to bring him back his homeland, where he encounters the Taliban in all their malevolent glory.

Verdict: This brief synopsis can in no way do justice to the wonder that is The Kite Runner. In simple yet luminous prose, Khalid Hosseini, creates an elegiac portrait of a lost world. While some of the plot twists can be a bit contrived, this compelling novel can move you in a unique and intense way; several times, it made me cry (and a novel hasn't made me cry since so frequently since I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn at the age of 13). Of the dozen or so books chosen by the book group, this is one of only two that everyone adored (the other was Ian MacEwan's Attonement).

Book Four: Brick Lane, by Monica Ali

Where The Kite Runner was fuelled by testosterone--boys and men and their often harrowing adventures--Brick Lane is replete with estrogen. It tells the coming-of-age story of Nazneen, who, at 18, is sent from her small village in Bangladesh to marry a man more than twice her age in London, England. Nazneen is an outwardly docile woman, trained at an early age to accept whatever life offers her without exerting too much of her own will. To her mind, that is called "fate", and the ability to accept one's fate without complaint is a Muslim woman's duty.