In a prison cell in the US, a man stands trembling,
naked, fearfully waiting to be shipped to Guantanamo
Bay. How did it come to this? he wonders. August 9th,
1945, Nagasaki. Hiroko Tanaka steps out onto her
veranda, taking in the view of the terraced slopes
leading up to the sky. Wrapped in a kimono with three
black cranes swooping across the back, she is
twenty-one, in love with the man she is to marry, Konrad
Weiss. In a split second, the world turns white. In the
next, it explodes with the sound of fire and the horror
of realisation. In the numbing aftermath of a bomb that
obliterates everything she has known, all that remains
are the bird-shaped burns on her back, an indelible
reminder of the world she has lost. In search of new
beginnings, she travels to Delhi two years later. There
she walks into the lives of Konrad's half-sister,
Elizabeth, her husband James Burton, and their employee
Sajjad Ashraf, from whom she starts to learn Urdu. As
the years unravel, new homes replace those left behind
and old wars are seamlessly usurped by new conflicts.But
the shadows of history - personal, political - are cast
over the entwined worlds of the Burtons, Ashrafs and the
Tanakas as they are transported from Pakistan to New
York, and in the novel's astonishing climax, to
Afghanistan in the immediate wake of 9/11. The ties that
have bound them together over decades and generations
are tested to the extreme, with unforeseeable
consequences. Sweeping in its scope and mesmerising in
its evocation of time and place, ''Burnt Shadows'' is an
epic narrative of disasters evaded and confronted,
loyalties offered and repaid, and loves rewarded and
betrayed. |
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