Kamila Shamsie

Text in Arabic. 29 August 1945: Nagasaki: Hiroko Tanaka, twenty-one and in love with Konrad Weiss, the man she is about to marry, steps out onto her veranda, minutes before a nuclear explosion shatters her world and everything in it. Al-Thelal Al-Mohtariqa is an epic narrative of disasters evaded and confronted, loyalties offered and repaid, and loves rewarded and betrayed.

Sydänystäviksi syntyneet Karim ja Raheen täydentävät toistensa lauseita, puhuvat anagrammein ja nukkuvat nikama nikamaa vasten. Kuin sisko ja veli he ovat erottamattomasti sidoksissa toisiinsa ja Karachiin, kaupunkiin joka on väkivaltainen, likainen, korruptoitunut, elävä, rohkea ja ennen kaikkea koti. Kartoista pakkomielteisen kiinnostuneen Karimin perhe muuttaa Lontooseen paetakseen Pakistanin levottomuuksia, ja Karim ja Raheen erkaantuvat toisistaan vuosikausiksi. Etnisen väkivallan jälleenvärittämä kesä saa aikuisiksi kasvaneet ystävykset kohtaamaan viimein taas toisensa - ja joukon ravisuttavia totuuksia, joilta on ollut helpompi sulkea silmät." Kansakunnan syntymävuoden 1947 ja vuoden 1995 välille, täsmälleen meidän alkumme ja nykyhetkemme puoliväliin, osuu vuosi 1971, josta minä en tiedä juuri mitään - paitsi että silloin oli sota, ja Itä-Pakistanista tuli Bangladesh, ja että silloin me varmaan syyllistyimme hirvittäviin tekoihin, koska niistä on pitänyt vaieta näin tyystin. Onko meidät mykistänyt häpeä kun hävisimme sodan ¿ vai syyllisyys siitä mitä yritimme voittaa?" Kiihkeä, koskettava ja riemukas Kartanpiirtäjä on rakkauslaulu Karachille. Kamila Shamsie osoittaa, että mitä tahansa maailmassa tapahtuukin, emme saa unohtaa sitä monimutkaista sotaa, jota käydään sydämissämme.

Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows is a story for our time by "a writer of immense ambition and strength. . . . This is an absorbing novel that commands in the reader a powerful emotional and intellectual response" -Salman Rushdie. Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book AwardAn Orange Prize Finalist Nagasaki, August 9, 1945. Hiroko Tanaka watches her lover from the veranda as he leaves. Sunlight streams across Urakami Valley, and then the world goes white. In the devastating aftermath of the atomic bomb, Hiroko leaves Japan in search of new beginnings. From Delhi, amid India's cry for independence from British colonial rule, to New York City in the immediate wake of 9/11, to the novel's astonishing climax in Afghanistan, a violent history casts its shadow the entire world over. Sweeping in its scope and mesmerizing in its evocation of time and place, this is a tale of love and war, of three generations, and three world-changing historic events.

Fourteen years ago, famous Pakistani activist Samina Akram disappeared. Two years earlier, her lover, Pakistan's greatest poet, was beaten to death by government thugs. In present-day Karachi, her daughter Aasmaani has just discovered a letter in the couple's private code--a letter that could only have been written recently. Aasmaani is thirty, single, drifting from job to job. Always left behind whenever Samina followed the Poet into exile, she had assumed that her mother's disappearance was simply another abandonment. Then, while working at Pakistan's first independent TV station, Aasmaani runs into an old friend of Samina's who gives her the first letter, then many more. Where could the letters have come from? And will they lead her to her mother? Merging the personal with the political, Broken Verses is at once a sharp, thrilling journey through modern-day Pakistan, a carefully coded mystery, and an intimate mother-daughter story that asks how we forgive a mother who leaves.

Raheen and her best friend, Karim, share an idyllic childhood in upper-class Karachi. Their parents were even once engaged to each others' partners until they rematched in what they call "the fianc e swap." But as adolescence distances the friends, Karim takes refuge in maps while Raheen searches for the secret behind her parents' exchange. What she uncovers reveals not just a family's but a country's turbulent history-and a grown-up Raheen and Karim are caught between strained friendship and fated love. A love story with a family mystery at its heart, Kartography is a dazzling novel by a young writer of astonishing maturity and exhilarating style. Shamsie transports us to a world we have not often seen in fiction-vibrant, dangerous, sensuous Pakistan. But even as she takes us far from the familiar, her story of passion and family secrets rings universally true.