Burnt Shadows
Author(s): Kamila Shamsie
In a prison cell in the US, a man stands trembling, naked, fearfully waiting to be shipped to Guantanamo Bay. How did it come to this, he wonders? 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. In search of new beginnings, she travels to Delhi two years later. There she walks into the lives of Konrad's half-sister, Elizabeth, 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.
Product Information
For fans of The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar and The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai. Bolder and more ambitious than her previous novels, this is a major novel about people from different nations and cultures. It has huge commercial potential. Rights have been sold in 20 countries including Holland, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Norway, Finland, US and Germany (Berlin Verlag)
Shortlisted for Orange Prize for Fiction 2009.
'An absorbing novel that commands, in the reader, a powerful emotional and intellectual response ... Kamila Shamsie is a writer of immense strength' - Salman Rushdie 'A brilliant book ... she is so extraordinary a writer' - Nadeem Aslam 'I feel that I have travelled the world and spent the past six decades with Hiroko and her family. Burnt Shadows is a beautiful, beautiful book' - Tahmima Anam 'Audacious in its ambition, epic in its scope. One can only admire the huge advances she has made, and helped us to make, in understanding the new global tensions' - Anita Desai
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.
General Fields
- :
- : Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- : Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- : 28 February 2009
- : 234mm X 153mm
- : United Kingdom
- : books
Special Fields
- : Kamila Shamsie
- : Paperback
- : Airport & export ed
- : 384
- : Modern fiction