Home Fire

One finishes reading Kamila Shamsie's extraordinary Home Fire completely stunned. She has written a brilliant story about two families who share geography and become linked by fate - one that has known exile, death, and family mystery, and another that has adapted to the so-called mainstream. Family, religion, the politics of media, various forms of seduction, and present-day devices all bring themselves to bear in utterly telling form. The U.S., London, Karachi, Syria, and Istanbul all figure into this book, which is of this time and age and beyond. One of the finest writers at work in English today, Kamila Shamsie has written her most heartbreaking, beautiful, necessary book yet.

Living under the legacy of their jihadist father, the Pasha children know to keep their heads down and mind their business—all the better to avoid scrutiny and suspicion. That is, until one of them commits a devastating and irreparable act of betrayal. Here is a luminous, charged account of an unshakeable familial bond—of the courage to stand, alone, for loved ones and to insist on the truth in the face of rampant rumors and orchestrated fallacies. Here, too, is an incisive and gut-wrenching reminder of the human lives caught in the politics of immigration and nationalism, of who belongs and who doesn’t, and of those who fall prey to the idea that there is an us and a them, or an us vs. them.