"Kite Runner" Author Soars To New Heights

Khaled Hosseini Now Has Another Bestseller On Afghanistan, And A Movie

(CBS)  The central character, Amir, must live with the fact that he was too afraid to help his best friend from being raped. It's a scene that's causing controversy. The main issue is that Muslim sensibilities will be inflamed by the rape sequence. Fearing reprisals, the studio delayed the release of the film until they could move the child actors out of Afghanistan for their own protection.

"It's very, very upsetting," Hosseini said. "If you see the film, the children are tremendous. I actually met them when they were on the set, and they're beautiful people. The idea that somebody would want to harm them because of their performance in the film, the idea is reprehensible. It bothers me, especially because I think ultimately the film is antithetical to any notions of ugliness and exploitation."

Amir, who also had to leave Afghanistan, eventually returns as an adult, just like Hosseini, who returned after he finished "The Kite Runner."

"It was so surreal," he said. "I spoke to people, it turned out that a lot of things I said in the novel were real. In fact, the reality of what I found in Kabul was in many ways even worse. The brutality of the Taliban was incredible. Children watching their parents being killed in front of them, young girls sold into prostitution, forced into marriage, raped."

It was the stories he heard there about Afghan women that set Hosseini, who has since stopped working as a doctor, on a mission to write his next novel, "A Thousand Splendid Suns."

"Afghan women, as a group, I think their suffering has been equaled by very few other groups in recent world history," Hosseini said.

There would be no fanciful images of kites to inspire this story. Hosseini says he was haunted by videotape, smuggled out of Afghanistan, of a woman being executed by the Taliban.

"That clip played in my mind over and over again," he said. "I remember the writer in me saw that woman walking her final steps. And I began in my mind somehow creating a life, a background, a history for this woman."

In the novel, that woman is Mariam, who's beaten and abused by a monstrous husband.

"It wasn't easy tolerating him talking to her this way," he writes in "A Thousand Splendid Suns." "To bear his scorn, his ridicule, his insults, his walking past her like she was nothing but a house cat. But after four years of marriage, Mariam saw clearly how much a woman could tolerate when she was afraid."

The novel debuted in January at the top of bestseller lists across the country, and Hosseini now finds himself arguably the most famous voice of Afghanistan.

"I hope people read these books and think about Afghanistan and the people who live there as real people," Hosseini said. "And for what happened, the tragedy in Afghanistan, to not be some flat statistic which doesn't echo in any kind of real way with you. But it happened to real people who are not that different from us."