13 Books Like The Kite Runner, Sorted by How Much Hope They Give You

Mariam is the unwanted daughter of a rich man, married off at fifteen to a shoemaker in Kabul thirty years older than her. Nearly two decades later Laila, a bright girl from the same street, ends up in the same house as the second wife. What happens between these two women across the Soviet withdrawal, the civil war and the Taliban years is the whole book. Hosseini writes here exactly as he did in The Kite Runner, plainly and emotionally, always aiming for your chest, and the aim is better this time. The ending asks one of them to pay for the other.

Nigeria in the 1960s. Ugwu is a village boy who becomes houseboy to a university lecturer with revolutionary opinions. Olanna, the lecturer's partner, is beautiful and educated and about to discover what her class has been protecting her from. Richard is an Englishman writing a book he will never finish. Then the east secedes as Biafra, the blockade begins, and the three of them are moved around by a war that eats everything, including their decency. Adichie writes people first and history second, which is why the horror lands. You know these characters well enough to be furious at what they do to survive.

It opens with a folk tale about a farmer forced to hand one child to a monster so the rest of the family can live, and then Hosseini spends four hundred pages playing that story out in real lives. Abdullah and his small sister Pari are separated by a decision adults make while telling themselves they are being kind. The chapters that follow jump to Paris, a Greek island, California and back to Kabul, each in a different voice, each standing at some distance from the first wound. It is his most ambitious book and his least tidy one.

It is 1975, the Emergency has been declared, and a widow named Dina takes in two tailors from a village and a student boarder to keep her small business alive. For a few hundred pages you get something close to happiness in that flat, four people learning how to eat together. Then Mistry removes it piece by piece, through slum clearance, forced sterilisation and caste violence, and he does it without ever raising his voice. Structurally this is the Indian novel closest to The Kite Runner, an ordinary life crushed by a state, except that Mistry refuses to pay anybody back at the end.

Effia and Esi are born in different villages in what is now Ghana and never meet. One is married to the British governor of Cape Coast Castle. The other is held in the dungeon beneath that same castle before being shipped across the Atlantic. Every chapter afterwards belongs to one descendant of one of them, alternating branches, moving through slavery, the Asante wars, coal mines in Alabama, Harlem, and finally two young people in the present who know none of this. Each chapter works almost as a short story, so the book moves quickly even when the subject is unbearable.

Liesel is nine when she is handed to a poor couple in a small German town in 1939, and she cannot read. Hans, the man of the house, teaches her at night out of a book she stole at her brother's funeral. The war arrives slowly, in ration queues and Hitler Youth drills, and then all at once in the form of a young Jewish man named Max who knocks on the door and lives in the basement. The narrator is Death, tired and unexpectedly kind, who tells you what is coming long before it arrives. That choice should be a gimmick and somehow never is.

Valentino Achak Deng walked out of southern Sudan as a small boy when the civil war reached his village, crossed to Ethiopia and then Kenya on foot with thousands of other boys, spent years in camps, and was resettled in Atlanta, where the book opens with him tied up in his own apartment during a robbery. Eggers interviewed him for years and then wrote it in Valentino's first person, calling it a novel because nobody can report a childhood sentence by sentence from memory. It is funny in places, which you will not expect, and openly angry about what resettlement actually feels like.

Nuri kept bees outside Aleppo with his cousin and sold honey at the market until the war ended that life and their small son with it. His wife Afra, a painter, loses her sight in the blast. The novel follows the two of them through Turkey, Greece and finally a boarding house in England, cutting between the road and the memory of the hives. Lefteri volunteered at a refugee centre in Athens, and the details of the journey feel gathered rather than imagined. Nuri is an unreliable guide to his own grief, which the book handles far better than it handles its final act.

Hiroko Tanaka is in Nagasaki in August 1945 with a German fiance and a silk kimono with birds on the back. The bomb kills him and burns those birds into her skin. She travels to Delhi to find his sister's family, marries the household's Indian employee, moves to Karachi at Partition, and decades later her son is in New York and then in Afghanistan. Shamsie is tracking one thing across sixty years: how powerful people borrow other people's countries and then go home. The final section, after 2001, is where a long polite friendship between two families finally snaps.

Changez comes from a fading Lahore family, wins a place at Princeton, gets hired by a valuation firm in New York and turns out to be very good at it. Then the towers come down while he is away on a work trip, and he catches his own face in a hotel mirror doing something he cannot explain to himself: smiling. The whole novel is his monologue to an American he has invited to dinner in Lahore, and the tension sits in everything neither man says out loud. Under two hundred pages, moving like a thriller while arguing like an essay.

Yasmina Khadra is the pen name of Mohammed Moulessehoul, an Algerian army officer who wrote under his wife's names to get around military censorship. His Kabul is dust, public executions and men with nothing left to do. Atiq guards women condemned to die and cannot cope with his own wife's illness at home. Mohsen and Zunaira were educated and in love before the regime arrived, and are now sealed in a room together with their futures cancelled. The two households collide in a way you can see coming from a long way off and still cannot look away from.

Seierstad moved in with the household of a bookseller who had hidden and sold books through three regimes, and wrote the family as characters: the patriarch taking a second wife, the sons kept out of school to work the shop, the youngest sister running the house like an unpaid servant. Read as reportage it is one of the sharpest pictures of ordinary Afghan life after 2001 that anyone published. Read as ethics it is complicated, because the family objected in public, the bookseller wrote a book of his own in reply, and his second wife sued her in Norway.

Bruno's father is promoted, the family leaves Berlin for a house beside a place Bruno hears as Out With, and from his window he can see people in striped pyjamas. He walks the length of the fence and meets Shmuel, a boy his own age on the other side, and their friendship is conducted through wire for most of the book. Boyne has called it a fable rather than a historical novel, and the flatness of the writing is deliberate. It reads in an afternoon, and the ending is famous enough that many readers arrive already knowing it.