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Very Moving ... harrowing A moving story from Kabul, and a brilliant study in guilt, this book is the story of a boy who never quite gets over a traumatic episode in his youth. Out of fear, and an all too understandable reluctance to get involved, he witnesses the brutal rape of a young friend, but fails to try to intervene. The sense of guilt which he feels as a result runs like a leitmotif through this book and gives it its essential unity. I confess to a slight disappointment that the author forces his reader to endure yet another description of a football-match in Kabul under the Taliban ... You will have guessed that it features a gruesome account of the obligatory execution - by stoning - of an adulterous couple. This episode aside, I found the book moving, not maudlin and melodramatic as I gather other readers accused it of being, and I recommend it strongly as both an emotionally -- harrowing narrative, and a convincing account of present-day Afghanistan. Let me recommend this novel along with one other: The Losers' Club: Complete Restored Edition by Richard Perez, a "used" copy of which I picked up off Amazon and which turned out to be another book I adored.