Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie’s `Burnt Shadows’ begins with a melancholic verse from Sahir Ludhianwi about war. That lyric and melancholic strain continues to haunt the next 363 pages as Shamsie weaves a compelling story about a woman’s journey from Japan to India to Turkey to Pakisan and finally in New York.Hiroko Tanaka hops from one historical chapter to another – the bombing of Nagasaki, pre-partition Delhi, partition and the creation of Pakistan, the raising of the mujhahideens to fight the Soviets, and 9/11.
Hiroko's journey also glues together two families – three generations of the Burtons and the Ashrafs – whose lives violently change as big tragedies of the 20th century wreck their worlds.
The narrative is powerful and is one of the best post-9/11 works after Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Like the latter, however, Shadows is not a novel of ideas though Shamsie dwells on topics from the horrors of nuclear war to Islamic fundamentalism, racial profiling and private military contractors. She makes up for it with a powerful story.
