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This overtly gentle story hides, as do the histories within it, a subterranean violence, and its denouement plays this out to the full. There are some evocative moments, such as Abdul’s first encounter with the sea. Having asked himself what could be so special about water—after all, it is for bathing and cooking—Abdul is transfixed when he sees "a corrugated sheet of shifting greys...that edged slowly towards the misty golden sunin the distance".
In the end though, it is class that wins out—as it does in another novel that this one reminds you of, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini—a fact that comes home to Haroon on his return to the house where he saw his father batter his mother, and then face a violent death himself.
