RETRO READS

THE KITE RUNNER by Khaled Hosseini (Bloomsbury £8.99)

Shocking, tragic and inspirational, this wonderful novel details the vibrant culture of Afghanistan before the Taliban.

it’s about two boyhood friends, how one betrays the other and, years later, tries to atone for his wickedness.

At the finest house in kabul — marble floors, rose gardens, crystal chandeliers — one boy is privileged, while the other works as his loyal servant, living in a shack in the grounds.

Aged 18, the rich boy is smuggled out of the war-torn city to the U.S. At 40, he returns to find a ‘city of ghosts’, houses burnt, mines planted, and, while seeking his friend, makes an astounding discovery.

RESTLESS by William Boyd

(Bloomsbury £8.99) WhAT do you do when the mother you know and love turns out to have woven webs of lies about her past?

in Boyd’s turbocharged spythriller, Ruth, 30, visiting Mum at her cotswolds cottage, is handed a bulky file headed ‘The Story of Eva Delectorskaya’. ‘Who’s that?’ asks Ruth. ‘Me,’ replies Mum. The discovery that Mum is half-Russian and fled from the 1917 Revolution comes as a bombshell.

So begins a compelling tale of female courage, double agents, undercover skulduggery, murder by sharp-pointed pencil and a blackguard spy who’s become a slimy peer of the realm.

Better than James Bond!

LANGRISHE, GO DOWN by Aidan Higgins

(Apollo £10) ThE melancholy beauty of higgins’s prose made me cry. in the ireland of 1938, three impoverished, unmarried sisters endure life in their once-grand house. They have witnessed its decay and their own.

central to the book is the affair between the youngest (then 40) and an arrogant sponger of a writer living rent- free on the estate.

he introduces her to drink, passion and heartbreak.

Love lost and the past obsess her as she now exists with only memories, mice and mildew, wondering if ‘ the memory of things is better than the things themselves’.