Other titles selected by reading groups, who placed their votes via the Penguin and Orange websites and by entering themselves for the Penguin/Orange Broadband Readers' Group Prize, include former Orange and Booker Prize winners, older titles such as Barbara Kingsolver's tale of a missionary who takes his family to live in the Congo, The Poisonwood Bible, and bestsellers including Victoria Hislop's The Island.

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Hosseini's editor at Bloomsbury, Alexandra Pringle, believes he is popular with reading groups for opening a door into a different culture. "We are bombarded in the news with Afghanistan so to be taken by the hand into that country and to meet the people through the joy of reading a novel is a really remarkable thing. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun does that too - you feel you've been absolutely changed, that your understanding of the world has been significantly enhanced, and not through reading a dry history book. There's a huge appetite for that, and I think Khaled is the strongest at providing it."

Hosseini said he was "deeply grateful" to reading groups for embracing The Kite Runner, which has now sold more than two-and-a-half million copies in the UK. "The writing of this book was a labour of love for me. I grew quite attached to the characters and came to care for them in a most personal way," he said. "Sharing this book that means so much to me with readers in the UK has been gratifying to me beyond words."

"I revisited the short story and decided that maybe there was a book in it," Hosseini recalls, leaning against the thick cushions of his living room sofa. "It really started off very small."

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"That it would reach this kind of readership is pretty stunning," says Hosseini, wearing a striped button-down shirt and white pants. "It's still pretty weird."

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Hosseini, 40, is surprisingly modest for a first-time novelist who has enjoyed such phenomenal success. He's still getting used to his newfound fame, and says he never intended to be a writer. "I always loved writing, but I really just did it for myself because I enjoyed the act of writing and creating stories," says Hosseini, speaking English with only a slight accent. "I never wrote with the aim of publishing. ... Now I find myself doing it for a living, at least for the time being." Hosseini and his wife, a Silicon Valley attorney who is also of Afghan descent, speak to their children in both Farsi and English and maintain close ties to the San Francisco Bay area's Afghan community.

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Hosseini comes from a large, prominent family in Kabul. His father was a diplomat and his mother was a teacher. He's the oldest of five children raised in a secular household. And while there's no single childhood event that haunts him, Hosseini says he always felt guilty about his privilege. "I was raised in an affluent life in a very poor country, and you always have that sense of guilt about your own good fortune," he says.