Khaled Hosseini is a gifted storyteller from a culture with a long tradition of telling tales that use powerful metaphors to make their point. There are echoes of Persian parables, of Sohrab and Rustum and of Rumi’s wisdoms in The Kite Runner (Simon and Schuster, CDs £16.99, offer £15.29), a novel about two Afghan boys, one privileged, one his servant. Narrated in the first person by the author, it sounds so truthful that the incorrect description of it as “nonfiction” on the cover is almost excusable.

Vividly set in Kabul before and after the Soviet occupation, the rise of the Taleban and the post-9/11 US invasion, it brings home the effect of extremism on ordinary families. But this novel is more than mere documentary. What matters most is the intensity of Amir and Hassan’s spiritual journeys: a friend betrayed, a long-delayed atonement, the proving of a son’s worth to an unintentionally cruel father, the winning of trust from an abused child. This will have you inventing reasons to listen right to the end.

I didn’t see the Louis Theroux documentary series When Louis Met . . . in which he investigated some of the US’s most politically incorrect and bizarre subcultures. He followed up his interviewees a few years later and wrote about what became of them in The Call of the Weird (Macmillan, CDs £13, offer £11.70). But there is no need to have done so as there are brief recaps sketching in the strange mindsets of UFO spotters in Arizona, porn stars in Los Angeles (including a bored girl from Kent delighted with the new variety in her sex life), neo-Nazis in Idaho, a con-man self-help guru running a millionaire mentorship programme and an Aryan extremist mother-and-twin-girl band.

What is even more bizarre than their courteous tolerance of Theroux’s questions is their sheer ordinariness: whatever you do to earn a crust or save the planet, there are hard days and frustrations, pride in workmanship and personal sensitivities. Theroux reads with low-key ribaldry, aware that running through this horribly fascinating documentary is a serious purpose: a warning that strong characters can and do dominate weak ones by appealing to our least pleasant basic instincts.

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