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Kamila
Shamsie
Burnt Shadows
ISBN:
9781408800874
Paperback, 384 pages € 16,99
Bloomsbury
In a prison cell in the US, a man
stands trembling, naked, fearfully
waiting to be shipped to Guantánamo
Bay. How did it come to this?
August 9th 1945, Nagasaki. Hiroko
Tanaka steps out onto her veranda,
taking in the view of the terraced
slopes leading up to the sky.
Wrapped in a kimono with three black
cranes swooping across the back, she
is twenty-one, in love with the man
she is to marry, Konrad Weiss.
In a split second, the world turns
white. In the next, it explodes with
the sound of fire and the horror of
realisation. In the numbing
aftermath of a bomb that obliterates
everything she has known, all that
remains are the bird-shaped burns on
her back, an indelible reminder of
the world she has lost.
Two years later, in search of new
beginnings, Hiroko travels to Delhi.
There she walks into the lives of
Konrad’s half-sister, her husband
James Burton, and their employee
Sajjad Ashraf, from whom she starts
to learn Urdu. As the years unravel,
new homes replace those left behind
and old wars are seamlessly usurped
by new conflicts. But the shadows of
history – personal and political –
are cast over the entwined worlds of
the Burtons, Ashrafs and the Tanakas
as they are transported from
Pakistan to New York, and,
ultimately, to Afghanistan in the
immediate wake of 9/11. The ties
that have bound them together over
decades and generations are tested
to the extreme, with unforeseeable
consequences.
Burnt Shadows
has been shortlisted for the Orange
Prize for fiction 2009.
Kamila Shamsie was born in 1973 in
Pakistan. She is the author of
In the City by the Sea,
Kartography (both
shortlisted for the John Llewellyn
Rhys/ Mail on Sunday Prize),
Salt and Saffron and
Broken Verses. In
1999 she received the Prime
Minister's Award for Literature and
in 2004 the Patras Bokhari Award -
both award by the Pakistan Academy
of Letters. Kamila Shamsie lives in
London and Karachi.
Sweeping in its scope and
mesmerising in its evocation of time
and place,
Burnt Shadows, published
by Bloomsbury in March 2009 and in
paperback in October 2009, is
an epic narrative of disasters
evaded and confronted, loyalties
offered and repaid, and loves
rewarded and betrayed.
'The huge ambition of Kamila
Shamsie's fifth novel is announced
in the prologue. As an unnamed
captive is unshackled and stripped
naked in readiness for the anonymity
of an orange jumpsuit, he wonders: "How
did it come to this?" The vastness
of the question as applied to a
prisoner in Guantánamo is a
challenge to which this epic yet
skilfully controlled novel rises in
oblique and unexpected ways.'
Maya Jaggi, The Guardian
Click
here for an extract
Reading Group Guide
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Kamila Shamsie describes the
inspiration for her novel Burnt
Shadows.
Interview on YouTube
Geographical scope:
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Japan, Nagasaki 1945
Accounts of the American
justification for dropping a
second bomb in Nagasaki. From
the BBC.
-
India, Delhi 1947
Last Days of The Raj 1of9 - the
End of British India. A
dramatized documentary.
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Pakistan 1983 ('When The Sovjets were in Afghanistan
and America and Pakistan were
involved fighting them.')
Sovjet soldiers in Afghanistan
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Afghanistan 2002
-
VS, New York 2002
World Trade Center Attacks
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