It seemed like there weren't many books dealing with a contemporary immigrant's experience before Khaled Hosseini's debut novel, The Kite Runner, was published in 2003.

It was this quality that first attracted playwright Matthew Spangler to adapt for the stage Hosseini's tale of two boyhood friends - Amir and Hassan - growing up in Afghanistan against a backdrop of war.

With both men living in the same Californian neighbourhood, Hosseini and Spangler met for coffee, with the end result being Spangler's version of The Kite Runner, currently on a UK tour in a co-production by Nottingham Playhouse and Liverpool Playhouse, and which arrives in Edinburgh next week.

"I first read the book in 2005," says Spangler, "and a lot of it is set locally to me, in the area where the family in the novel move to. The first attraction to me was that it was a book about the immigrant's experience, but it's a book about many things. It's a love story, a father-son story, it's a book about two best friends, and so on, so there are all these things going on in it, and there's something there for everyone to grab hold of."

Spangler developed and directed an early version of the play at San Jose State University in 2007, where he is an associate professor of performance studies. The fact that the main character in the book actually attends San Jose State gave the production an extra frisson for the students who performed in it. The Kite Runner received its professional premiere two years later, also in San Jose, since when it has been seen in several American and Canadian productions prior to making its UK debut in 2013.

"The book has a huge following," Spangler observes, "and people who come along to see the play are going to notice the changes, so you have to be faithful to its essence, but you can't put everything in. Fortunately Khaled Hosseini is a very generous person, and when we met and I told him my ideas, most of his comments about them were about things that he would change if he were writing the book today."

One of the things Spangler was aware of was representing Afghan culture as accurately as possible.

"As a playwright I was very concerned about accuracy," says Spangler. "By putting something on a stage you're already doing something that isn't accurate, but if you're going to do that, you have to represent the details of Afghan culture without being offensive. For instance, a wedding scene would take an entire day if we were going to portray it accurately, but you have to try and condense that into just a few minutes.

"For each production we've hired a cultural consultant, just to make sure we get things right about characters who would or wouldn't shake hands with another character. It's not every play you need a cultural consultant. You wouldn't need one on a Martin McDonagh play, for instance, but in this case it's necessary."

Spangler's previous work has included solo versions of James Joyce's Dubliners and Finnegans Wake, as well as an adaptation of John Cheever's short stories, A Paradise It Seems, and Mozart!, a staging of the composer's letters.

There have also been stage versions of fiction by John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway, adaptations of Thomas Wolfe's The Lost Boy, Clyde Edgerton's Where Trouble Sleeps and a recent look at TC Boyle's Tortilla Curtain. Spangler's next project will be Albatross, an adaptation of Coleridge's poem, The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner.

Spangler's interest in the immigrant's experience was first piqued by his time in Ireland, where he studied at Trinity College, Dublin. He has written about it extensively in his soon-to-be-published book, Staging Intercultural Ireland: New Plays And Practitioner Perspectives.

"That was my first point of contact with immigration," Spangler remembers. "It was the 1990s, and that was reflected in the arts community in Ireland, and the way theatre and the imagination was galvanised by immigrants and gave it this new energy."

The ongoing global success of The Kite Runner, first as a book, then a film and now in Spangler's play, suggests that Hosseini's story has a far greater reach than speaking solely about the immigrant experience.

"It's a story of redemption," says Spangler. "Amir is asking for forgiveness for this terrible thing he did as a child and the consequences of that act, and that is something I think that speaks to us all."

The Kite Runner, King's Theatre, Edinburgh, November 10-15. www.edtheatres.com