Burnt Shadows
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'A formidable arching tale about loss and foreignness' - Financial Times
'Powerful, epic yet skilfully controlled … Shamsie's voice is clear and compelling, with a welcome sparseness' - Guardian
'Completely authentic, complex, and breath-stopping' - Emma Thompson
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SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORANGE PRIZE
BY THE ACCLAIMED WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION
Here was one who would squeeze the sun in her fist if she ever got the chance; yes, and tilt her head back to swallow its liquid light.
August 9th, 1945, Nagasaki. Twenty-one year old Hiroko Tanaka steps out onto her veranda, wearing an embroidered kimono ahead of her marriage to Konrad Weiss. In a second of destruction and senseless violence, everything Hiroko has known and loved is decimated. The scars, both literal and metaphorical, will stay with her forever.
Attempting to escape this devastation, Hiroko travels to Delhi, encountering the bloodshed of an India undergoing Partition. As the years unravel, surnames change, new places become home and old wars are seamlessly usurped by new conflicts.
A novel of tremendous scope, across land and time, Burnt Shadows perceptively demonstrates the far and unyielding reach of the tentacles of war and displacement, and the irrevocable wounds of the past.
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'Shamsie achieves the near impossibility of a truly intimate epic tale … I challenge anyone to put this book down lightly' - Shami Chakrabarti, Observer, Books of the Year
'A giant of novel … Beautifully realised' - Independent
Kamila Shamsie is the author of eight novels: In the City by the Sea (shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize); Salt and Saffron; Kartography (also shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize); Broken Verses; Burnt Shadows (shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction); A God in Every Stone, which was shortlisted for the Baileys Prize, the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature; and Best of Friends, which was shortlisted for the Indie Book Awards 2023. Home Fire was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017, shortlisted for the Costa Best Novel Award 2017, and won the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2018. Three of her novels have received awards from Pakistan’s Academy of Letters. Kamila Shamsie is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was named a Granta Best of Young British Novelist in 2013. She grew up in Karachi and now lives in London.
@kamilashamsie