Burnt Shadows

Burnt Shadows, first published in 2009, is the fifth novel by Pakistani-British author Kamila Shamsie. A political-historical novel, it was nominated for the Orange Prize for Fiction, one of the UK’s most prestigious literary awards, and won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, which celebrates books that contribute to a greater understanding of racism and diversity. Shamsie has been shortlisted several times for a John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; she also received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literature in Pakistan in 1999, and her seventh novel, Home Fire (2017), was shortlisted for the renowned Booker Prize and won the Women’s Prize for Fiction. 

Burnt Shadows follows two families, the Pakistani-Japanese Tanaka-Ashrafs and the German-English-American Weiss-Burtons, as they intersect across generations and world historical events. Unfolding in a present-tense, third-person omniscient narration, Burnt Shadows explores the motivations of each of its main characters to reveal the complicated overlap of the personal and the political, using expressive prose and frequent symbolism to center the emotional stakes of the events it represents.

Plot Summary

In the Prologue, an unnamed prisoner waits alone in a cell at Guantanamo Bay.

Part 1 then opens on August 9, 1945 in Nagasaki, Japan, with

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