Kamila Shamsie's novel "Burnt Shadows" uses a cinemascope vision to portray a Japanese woman's struggle to understand her life in a spinning world where historic forces seem to lead her and her family into an inevitable showdown with fate. Hiroko carries the memories and scars imprinted into her skin from the atomic blast in Nagasaki in 1945 from Japan to India to post-partition Pakistan. Her son Raza carries the memories into a politically charged New York where the events of September 11, 2001 still loom in our headlines. Shamsie deftly leads the reader through the haunted landscapes of the last sixty years and by distilling chilling historical events through the vision of one family her words shed light into the shadows of time.
An important work that I highly recommend.
More on the author:
Kamila Shamsie: British Council Contemporary Authors
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