Kites? Who has time for kites? They require a freedom and frivolity usually associated with the endless summers of youth.

``I haven't flown one in ages. Who has time for such things?'' laughs Khaled Hosseini, the Afghan-American author whose ``The Kite Runner'' has sold more than 3 million copies and become a publishing world phenomenon.

``Between writing the second book, about women in Afghanistan, and traveling for the first one, I really haven't had time for much of anything,'' says Hosseini, a physician who immigrated to San Jose as a teenager in 1980. ``The book came out of the gates slowly -- there were days when I couldn't pay people to read it -- but then something happened, and it just took off . . . and changed my life drastically.''

That ``something'' was a network of book clubs and indie booksellers. They devoured Hosseini's autobiographical first novel and handed it off to others . . and the word spread: Here is a new author who deserves your attention.

According to the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, ``The Kite Runner'' has been the No. 1 or 2 fiction paperback in the Bay Area since it came out in paper in May 2004. The book was third -- after the latest Harry Potter and ``A Million Little Pieces'' -- on BookScan's list of top 200 titles of 2005.

To make time for his frenetic new career -- the second novel is due out in early 2007 -- Hosseini put his day job as a doctor on hold. There weren't enough hours in the day, he says, to see patients and juggle deadlines, speaking engagements and meetings on that inevitable ``Kite Runner'' movie, expected to go before the cameras in western China, Morocco and Fremont's Little Kabul in the fall.

On a more personal note, he and wife Roya, a lawyer for Intel Capital, have two young children and a new home in the South San Jose foothills, where hawks hover by day and coyotes call at night.``Sometimes the hawks swoop past our bedroom window -- you can see their eyes,'' says Hosseini, eyes widening for effect. ``We get all kinds of animals up here. When the coyotes kill something and go into a feeding frenzy, they make this gleeful howling sound. It's very unsettling.''

A mountain retreat with predators nipping at the borders -- somehow, it feels like a metaphor for the author's life, which he calls ``blessed'' but which has not been without incident.In 1976, the Hosseini family departed Kabul for Paris, where diplomat father Nasser Hosseini had been assigned to the Afghan Embassy. Plans to return home in 1980 were thwarted by the Soviet invasion. ``So my dad applied for political asylum and we moved from Paris to here. I was 15 years old.''

Some of these memories found their way into ``The Kite Runner,'' Hosseini's 2003 novel about childhood friends Amir and Hassan, bound by a love of kite fighting, torn by the antipathy of the Pashtun (Sunni Muslims) ruling class for the Hazaras (Shiite) underclass. Forbidden under Taliban rule, kites returned to the skies over Kabul in 2001, when the fundamentalist regime fell to the Northern Alliance. Hence, their importance in Afghan culture: They've come to symbolize deliverance from cruel oppression, spiritual rebirth.In San Jose, Khaled's father Nasser -- again like the transplanted Pashtun father of the book -- was forced to go on welfare and accept food stamps before landing a job as a driving instructor. ``In Kabul, he was on the giving end of charity, so, yes, it was an embarrassing time.''

Father and son scoured yard sales and kept a stall at the flea market on Berryessa Road, where they shared memories of home with others in the South Bay's burgeoning Afghan community.``My dad and I and a buddy of his had this little van. We'd fill the thermos with tea and get up early in the morning on Saturday and play Afghan music as we drove up and down streets, looking for garage sales.

``Then, on Sunday, we'd go to the flea market and sell all this junk.''

Hosseini, who spoke Farsi and French when he arrived here, says at first he felt like a social outcast at Independence High School in San Jose. ``But it was sink or swim, and I was fluent in English by the end of my freshman year. There was a period of adjustment, but I must say, in my 25 years here, I have personally never felt any kind of discrimination, even after 9/11.''He majored in biology at Santa Clara University, and then -- ``because the notion of being a writer seemed so unattainable'' -- entered medical school at the University of California-San Diego. He practiced medicine for eight years, five in Mountain View.

A born storyteller, Hosseini spent the pre-dawn hours at his computer, weaving fanciful plots. ``The Kite Runner'' began as a short story about kite fighting, in which a contestant attempts to sever his opponent's line and capture his kite. It evolved into something more, a story about boys from different ethnic sects, and how one betrays the other and carries the guilt for 20 years, until he returns to Kabul to learn the truth about his heritage and redeem himself.

Hosseini says he felt similar pangs of remorse when he returned to Kabul in 2003, on the eve of the book's publication, and heard ``chilling stories'' about how the Taliban had beaten women in the streets and dragged men to the mosque to pray eight times a day. He also visited Kabul Museum, which now housed crates of smashed antiquities.

He returned home with ``a palpable sense'' of survivor's guilt, the author acknowledges. ``I was born into a society where I was one of the elite, sort of the upper crust. And as an adult, watching one atrocious development after another from afar, you do come to feel a sense of `What did I do to deserve this?' There's an unease about unearned position.''

``The Kite Runner'' has for the most part ``been embraced'' by the Afghan establishment,'' says Hosseini, ``but definitely there are people whom the book rubs the wrong way. They object to the issue of ethnic contempt raised by the novel. It hit a raw nerve. It's a very sensitive issue in Afghanistan.''At a reading for the Society of Afghan Professionals in Fremont, he was almost shouted down by a vocal minority that said he had aired ``dirty laundry'' best kept private. ``Somebody got up and said, `You have done what the Soviets failed to do -- portray Afghanistan in a very negative light,' '' the author recalled.

Wali Ahmadi, who teaches Afghan literature at UC-Berkeley, and other experts have argued that Hosseini, in dramatizing his country's ethnic strife, has overstated and simplified the problem. ``If the antagonism between Pashtun and Hazara were as pervasive as Hosseini portrays it,'' says Ahmadi, ``this would have led to the disintegration of Afghanistan and its erasure from the map. He has exaggerated the animosity for dramatic effect in what is, essentially, a traditional, `action-packed' novel.''

Hosseini agrees that the Pashtun-Hazara division is less pronounced in the Bay Area. ``The ambient culture here is so powerful, it dilutes everything,'' he says. ``But you'd be surprised that not everybody who lives in exile here has the same disdain and scorn for the Taliban that you think they should have.''The author's new novel could be even more controversial. Tentatively titled ``Dreaming in Titanic City'' (Hosseini's lobbying for something catchier), it will consider the intertwining lives of two Afghan women, one from the country, the other from the city. ``It's set entirely in Afghanistan and starts in the mid-'50s and stops at 9/11,'' he says.

Once again, Roya -- on sabbatical from her job -- will act as her husband's ``at-home editor.'' Neither ``Kite Runner'' nor the new book could have been written without her input, he says.``Luckily, I'm not plagued by sophomore writer's block. So I'll turn in the third draft to her this week and hear what she has to say. She has a very good ear for dialogue.''

As for the ``Kite Runner'' movie, that will be shot by director Marc Forster (``Monster's Ball''), who has scouted locations in Fremont, where some of the book takes place. ``I saw a first draft of the script which was pretty faithful to the book,'' reports the author. ``They've found two boys in London they're very excited about. They tell me they want to make it as real and authentic as possible, not some Hollywoodized version of Afghanistan.''