Books like The Kite Runner
What should you read after Khaled Hosseini’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Khaled Hosseini
- Literary fiction
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Best books to read after The Kite Runner
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchA Thousand Splendid Suns
Khaled Hosseini
Hosseini's second novel, covering the same thirty years of Afghan history from the women's side. Most readers who loved the first say this one is better, and it hurts more.
- Afghanistan before and after
- Storytelling that goes straight for you
- A chance to make it right
- Two women, not two boys
Best for the long shadow of one choiceAnd the Mountains Echoed
Khaled Hosseini
A brother and sister separated in 1952, and sixty years of people orbiting that decision. Hosseini's most ambitious book about the thing he keeps writing: a wrong that will not stay buried.
- Guilt carried for decades
- Afghanistan before and after
- Starting again as an immigrant
- Nine narrators across continents
Worth a look — with a warningThe Shadow of the Wind
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Also a man reconstructing a boyhood in a city broken by war, also a friendship with a terrible cost — but Zafón wraps it in gothic mystery rather than confession.
- Guilt carried for decades
- A father whose approval is everything
- Storytelling that goes straight for you
- Melodramatic in the back half
Great matchCutting for Stone
Abraham Verghese
Twin brothers in Addis Ababa, a betrayal between them, a flight to America and a return years later to settle it. Structurally this is the closest book on the list.
- A childhood friendship betrayed
- Guilt carried for decades
- Starting again as an immigrant
- Six hundred and fifty pages
Best for class as the thing that ruins itThe God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy
Roy's twins and the man their family will not let them love — the caste line that Hassan lives on, in Kerala, written by someone with far more formal ambition.
- Class dividing two boys
- Guilt carried for decades
- A chance to make it right
- Fractured, non-linear structure
Best for the immigrant fatherThe Namesake
Jhumpa Lahiri
If the California chapters were what caught you — the flea market, the wedding, the father diminished by a new country — Lahiri writes that experience better than anyone.
- Starting again as an immigrant
- A father whose approval is everything
- Guilt carried for decades
- No violence, no war
Great matchThe Secret Life of Bees
Sue Monk Kidd
A child convinced she caused a death, running toward the only people who might forgive her. Same engine as Amir's guilt, on a South Carolina honey farm in 1964.
- A chance to make it right
- Guilt carried for decades
- Class dividing two boys
- Much gentler throughout
Great matchThe Color Purple
Alice Walker
Walker also writes about people separated by violence and reunited far too late, and she also refuses to end without repair. It is a harder read and a better book.
- A chance to make it right
- Storytelling that goes straight for you
- Class dividing two boys
- Written as letters
Best for a child inside a warThe Book Thief
Markus Zusak
The same trick Hosseini pulls — a friendship you become attached to, a historical catastrophe closing in, and no promise that the people you love get through it.
- Storytelling that goes straight for you
- A father whose approval is everything
- A childhood friendship betrayed
- Narrated by Death
Worth a look — with a warningLife of Pi
Yann Martel
The other book about a man telling his life in the only version he can bear — though you will be at sea with a tiger for two hundred pages first.
- Guilt carried for decades
- Storytelling that goes straight for you
- Long philosophical opening
Great matchThe Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver
A family carrying an unspeakable guilt out of a country they helped damage, and thirty years of trying to live with it. Kingsolver is unsparing about who pays for whose choices.
- Guilt carried for decades
- A father whose approval is everything
- Afghanistan before and after
- Five rotating narrators
Worth a look — with a warningLittle Bee
Chris Cleave
Two people bound by a single terrible minute on a beach, one of them able to walk away from it and one not. The moral machinery is Hosseini's, the polish is thinner.
- Guilt carried for decades
- A chance to make it right
- Starting again as an immigrant
- Manipulative in places
Best for a country coming apartHalf of a Yellow Sun
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Adichie does what Hosseini does — a war most Western readers know nothing about, made unbearable because you have spent two hundred pages loving the household inside it.
- Class dividing two boys
- Storytelling that goes straight for you
- Afghanistan before and after
- Biafra, late 1960s Nigeria
What should you read after The Kite Runner?
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini — hosseini's second novel, covering the same thirty years of Afghan history from the women's side. Most readers who loved the first say this one is better, and it hurts more.
If what stayed with you was guilt carried for decades, read And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini instead: a brother and sister separated in 1952, and sixty years of people orbiting that decision. Hosseini's most ambitious book about the thing he keeps writing: a wrong that will not stay buried. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón is the other strong option — also a man reconstructing a boyhood in a city broken by war, also a friendship with a terrible cost — but Zafón wraps it in gothic mystery rather than confession.
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