Amanda Craig
From Nagasaki to 9/11
Kamila Shamsie’s bold and ambitious fifth novel, Burnt Shadows, begins in Guantanamo prison and goes back to the bombing of Nagasaki before sweeping us forward over sixty years and across three continents. Its heroine, Hiroko, is a gifted Japanese linguist in love with a German, Konrad. He dies in the atomic explosion over Nagasaki, but she survives, although the embroidered cranes of her mother’s kimono are burnt indelibly on her back and heart. Forever defined by disaster in her native country, Hiroko travels to Delhi, where Konrad’s estranged half-sister is unhappily married to a British man, James. Hiroko’s vulnerability and honesty make her a welcome guest for Elizabeth, and when she begins to learn Urdu from James’s servant Sajjad Ashraf, an unusual cross-cultural romance begins.
This first third of the novel is an arresting achievement, combining an extraordinary heroine, an exceptional set of circumstances and an almost Forsterian ear for the inadvertent comedy of clashing cultures. Hiroko’s flight to India in the last year of British rule seems confident but is an act
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Humans may be the supremely musical animal, but, with or without us, this is a musical planet.'
@MathewJLyons on how music on earth began.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/symphony-of-a-thousand-millennia
'In 2007, German scientists analysed the soil of this lunar landscape and found that 17 per cent of its weight was made up of arsenic. The ground wasn’t poisoned – it was poison.'
http://ow.ly/Ck7j50Er3mu
'Rivalries are intense and dangerous, and someone has to die.'
@NJCooper_crime on new thrillers by @HenryCPorter, @k_faulkner, @annafbailey, @mserinkelly, @JoelDicker, @AlanJParks, @whartonswords and more.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/april-2021-crime-round-up