This week, we feature two splendid novels about boys’ friendships: one set in tumultuous Afghanistan and the other in Brooklyn, New York, in the ’40s.
Fiction A Tale of Friendship and Redemption
‘The Kite Runner’
By Khaled Hosseini
Originally published in 2003, this emotionally deep novel immerses readers in a country in chaos and a friendship strained by class divides and a guilty conscience. Amir and Hassan are torn apart by an act of childhood violence that haunts both of them for decades.
Riverhead Books, 2013, 400 pages Friends, Faith, and Family
‘The Chosen’
By Chaim Potok
Set in 1940s Brooklyn, this novel offers a banquet of themes: father-and-son relationships, boys’ coming of age, Jewish history and customs, the impact of the Holocaust, and the birth of Israel. Two friends are sometimes at odds with each other: secular Jew Reuven Malter and Danny Saunders, the son of a Hasidic rebbe. In their journey to manhood, they face their families’ love and strife as they forge their outlooks on world-changing events that will mark them for life. This is a highly recommended read….