Home Fire

Published Aug. 24, 2017 by Riverhead Books.

ISBN:
978-0-7352-1768-3
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4 stars (1 review)

Isma is free. After years spent raising her twin siblings in the wake of their mother's death, she is finally studying in America, resuming a dream long deferred. But she can't stop worrying about Aneeka, her beautiful, headstrong sister back in London - or their brother, Parvaiz, who's disappeared in pursuit of his own dream: to prove himself to the dark legacy of the jihadist father he never knew.

Then Eamonn enters the sisters' lives. Handsome and privileged, he inhabits a London worlds away from theirs. As the son of a powerful British Muslim politician, Eamonn has his own birthright to live up to - or defy. Is he to be a chance at love? The means of Parvaiz's salvation? Two families' fates are inextricably, devastatingly entwined in this searing novel that asks: what sacrifices will we make in the name of love?

A contemporary reimagining of Sophocles' Antigone, Home …

2 editions

reviewed Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie

"The ones we love ... are enemies of the state"

4 stars

Since reading Burnt Shadows I've wanted to discover more of Kamila Shamsie's fiction. She is a fine novelist. Her prose is never tedious or clumsy. She can manage a range from the everyday to the urgent, and in the everyday she repeatedly slips in observations about how life feels which make me marvel and assent. She can sketch in a character's backstory without boring you. She is wry, empathetic, economical in her effects, truly serious without solemnity, able to handle a variety of narrative viewpoints. I'll be reading more, I hope.

Home Fire (a title which invokes both the family and the military) is set in 2015, when IS was rampant and the UK government was throwing its forces and propaganda behind the security state. Anyone with brown skin was likely to be searched, prevented from travelling, and spat at in the streets -- even more than usual, I should …