Burnt Shadows

by Kamila Shamsie

Genres: Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
An Orange Prize Finalist

Nagasaki, August 9, 1945. Hiroko Tanaka watches her lover from the veranda as he leaves. Sunlight streams across Urakami Valley, and then the world goes white.

In the devastating aftermath of the atomic bomb, Hiroko leaves Japan in search of new beginnings. From Delhi, amid India's cry for independence from British colonial rule, to New York City in the immediate wake of 9/11, to the novel's astonishing climax in Afghanistan, a violent history casts its shadow the entire world over. Sweeping in its scope and mesmerizing in its evocation of time and place, this is a tale of love and war, of three generations, and three world-changing historic events. Burnt Shadows is a story for our time by "a writer of immense ambition and strength. . . . This is an absorbing novel that commands in the reader a powerful emotional and intellectual response" (Salman Rushdie).

Release date: April 27, 2009

Publisher: Picador

Print pages: 384

Sample

Burnt Shadows

The Yet Unknowing World
NAGASAKI, 9 AUGUST 1945
... a time to recollect every shadow, everything the earth was losing, a time to think of everything the earth and I had lost, of all that I would lose, of all that I was losing.


--AGHA SHAHID ALI, A Nostalgist's Map of America






In past wars only homes burnt, but this time Don't be surprised if even loneliness ignites. In past wars only bodies burnt, but this time Don't be surprised if even shadows ignite.


--SAHIR LUDHIANVI, Parchaiyaan
BURNT SHADOWS © 2009 by Kamila Shamsie.