Burnt Shadows – Kamila Shamsie

Some books manage to get an amazing amount of publicity and you wonder if they’re really worth it or if a marketing department is guiding your wallet in the bookshop. Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows seems to have had massive amounts of PR – for a while every book review page, every books related podcast and web site mentioned the book and it was shortlisted for the Orange Prize getting another round of publicity which didn’t seem to slow down when the paperback came out. So I was a bit concerned about falling prey to the publishing PR machine when I was stuck in Edinburgh Airport recently without a book and picked up a copy. But, it seems, sometimes torrents of rave reviews and publicity are warranted. Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows is a wonderful read.

If you like rolling sagas across generations and locations then it’s hard to avoid writers from India and Pakistan at the moment. Having been raised on Dickens, Zola and those grand old Russians now it is the South Asians who are churning out the great sagas for my reading entertainment it seems – Amitav Ghosh, Desai’s of various forenames and Shamsie. Burnt Shadows moves from Nagasaki to to Delhi to Karachi via the badlands of Afghanistan and a post-9/11 New York tracing Hiroko, a survivor of the atomic bomb who, via impending independence India, marries a Muslim destined to move north of the Partition line. And so the generations move – from Nagasaki, to Partition to the Afghan war against the Soviets, to 9-11. Shamsie drives the story forward nicely with some well rounded characters. The problem with these sort of books sometimes if the forcing of characters into events (Upton Sinclair, much as I love him for The Jungle etc, never really managed this with his Lanny Budd series) but Shamsie pulls it off.

There are so many reviews of this book around it doesn’t need me to add another. Still, Christmas is coming and if you’re looking for a good read over the holidays Burnt Shadows shouldn’t disappoint.