Burnt Shadows

The novel begins in a US prison cell, where a man stands naked and trembling, waiting to be shipped to Guantanamo Bay and wondering how he came to be there. The story then returns to 9 August 1945 in Nagasaki. Hiroko Tanaka, twenty-one, stands on her veranda in a kimono patterned with three black cranes, in love with Konrad Weiss, the man she is going to marry. Within moments a bomb destroys everything she knows, leaving only bird-shaped burns on her back as a lasting mark of the world she has lost.

Looking for a fresh start, Hiroko travels to Delhi two years later. There she becomes part of the lives of Konrad's half-sister Elizabeth, Elizabeth's husband James Burton, and their employee Sajjad Ashraf, from whom she begins to learn Urdu.

As the years pass, new homes replace old ones and new conflicts displace earlier wars. The Burtons, the Ashrafs and the Tanakas are carried from Pakistan to New York and finally to Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, all under the shadow of personal and political history. The bonds that have held them together across decades and generations are tested to the extreme.

The book is an epic of disasters avoided and faced, loyalties given and repaid, and loves rewarded and betrayed, spanning generations, cultures and continents. Kamila Shamsie is a Pakistani-British novelist born in Karachi.