A stunning, captivating novel spanning generations and the globe. From the bombing of Nagasaki through to the attacks of 9/11 we follow Hiroko Tanaka’s life, the people she meets, the places she goes the challenges she takes on. A lovely, lyrical, tender novel.
Text in Arabic. 29 August 1945: Nagasaki: Hiroko Tanaka, twenty-one and in love with Konrad Weiss, the man she is about to marry, steps out onto her veranda, minutes before a nuclear explosion shatters her world and everything in it. Al-Thelal Al-Mohtariqa is an epic narrative of disasters evaded and confronted, loyalties offered and repaid, and loves rewarded and betrayed.
'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.' - Salman Rushdie
‘Marvellous... It's a huge leap forward for her, I think; its breadth and depth are wonderful. It's beautifully paced, and delicately written; the past evoked with such lyricism and pain, the unbearable present so unbearably unbearable and yet it has such tenderness.’- Barbara Trapido
‘Burnt Shadows is a beautiful, beautiful book. I was entirely swept up in the story, and I feel, now that I’ve (so reluctantly) put it down, that I have travelled the world and spent the past six decades with Hiroko and her family. The book speaks boldly and powerfully of our age; I know it will stay with me for a long time to come.’ - Tahmima Anam, author of The Golden Age
‘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.’ - Anita Desai
Author
About Kamila Shamsie
Kamila Shamsie was born in 1973 in Pakistan. She is the author of four previous novels: 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.
Kamila Shamsie is available for interview and is also an experienced journalist, broadcaster, speaker and chairperson at public events.
