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A Novel
by Kamila Shamsie
Book Reviewed by:Beginning on August 9, 1945, in Nagasaki, and ending in a prison cell in the US in 2002, as a man is waiting to be sent to Guantanamo Bay, Burnt Shadows is an epic narrative of love and betrayal.
Hiroko Tanaka is twenty-one and in love with the man she is to marry, Konrad Weiss. As she steps onto her veranda, wrapped in a kimono with three black cranes swooping across the back, her world is suddenly and irrevocably altered. In the numbing aftermath of the atomic 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. In search of new beginnings, two years later, Hiroko travels to Delhi. It is there that her life will become intertwined with that of Konrad's half sister, Elizabeth, her husband, James Burton, and their employee Sajjad Ashraf, from whom she starts to learn Urdu.
With the partition of India, and the creation of Pakistan, Hiroko will find herself displaced once again, in a world where old wars are replaced by new conflicts. But the shadows of history--personal and political--are cast over the interrelated worlds of the Burtons, the Ashrafs, and the Tanakas as they are transported from Pakistan to New York and, in the novel's astonishing climax, to Afghanistan in the immediate wake of 9/11. The ties that have bound these families together over decades and generations are tested to the extreme, with unforeseeable consequences.
P R O L O G U E
Once he is in the cell they unshackle him and instruct him to strip. He
takes off the grey winter coat with brisk efficiency and then - as they
watch, arms folded - his movements slow, fear turning his fingers
clumsy on belt buckle, shirt buttons.
They wait until he is completely naked before they gather up his
clothes and leave. When he is dressed again, he suspects, he will be
wearing an orange jumpsuit.
The cold gleam of the steel bench makes his body shrivel. As long
as it’s possible, he’ll stand.
How did it come to this, he wonders.
The Yet Unknowing World
nagasaki, 9 august 1945
Later, the one who survives will remember that day as grey, but on
the morning of 9 August itself both the man from Berlin, Konrad
Weiss, and the schoolteacher, Hiroko Tanaka, step out of their
houses and notice the perfect blueness of the sky, into which white
smoke blooms from the chimneys of the munitions factories.
Konrad cannot see the ...
16 BookBrowse members read Burnt Shadows for "First Impressions" giving it very favorable reviews. Read the reviews...continued
Full Review
(602 words)
(Reviewed by First Impressions Reviewers).
Anita Desai
Burnt Shadows is audacious in its ambition, epic in its scope. A startling expansion of the author's intentions, imagination and craftsmanship. One can only admire the huge advances she has made, and helped us to make, in understanding the new global tensions. Mohsin Hamid
The most ambitious novel yet by this talented writer. In Burnt Shadows, Kamila Samsie casts her imagination remarkably far and wide, through time and across continents. Nadeem Aslam, author of Maps for Lost Lovers
Kamila Shamsie opens a vista onto the century we have just lived through--pointing out its terror and its solace. She is so extraordinary a writer that she also offers hints about the century we are living through--the dark corners that contain challenges, as well as the paths that lead to beauty's lair. Salman Rushdie
Kamila Shamsie is a writer of immense ambition and strength. She understands a great deal about the ways in which the world's many tragedies and histories shape one another, and about how human beings can try to avoid being crushed by their fate and can discover their humanity, even in the fiercest combat zones of the age. Burnt Shadows is an absorbing novel that commands, in the reader, a powerful emotional and intellectual response.While Indian authors have been the darlings of the literary world for the
past couple of decades, Pakistani novelists writing in English have remained in
the shadows -- but no longer. Even as their country sinks into violence, a growing
number of novelists are winning acclaim around the world. Here are five
Pakistani authors to watch out for:
Kamila Shamsie was born in 1973 in Pakistan. Her first novel,
In the City by the Sea, was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John
Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and her second,
Salt and Saffron, won her a place
on Orange's list of '21 Writers for the 21st Century'. In 1999 Kamila received
the Prime Minister's Award for Literature in Pakistan. She has a BA in Creative
Writing from ...
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