Home Fire
ABOUT
THE BOOK
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 Fire is an urgent, fiercely compelling story of loyalties torn apart when love and politics collide – confirming Kamila Shamsie as a master storyteller of our times.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
Home Fire is a riveting story of two Pakistani families based in London and the juxtaposition between how the two families are treated and how their lives intersect. Two sisters from a family with terrorist ties become involved with the son of a successful politician.
Shamsie’s compelling story is a modern-day Antigone set in a politically divisive London. This powerful, timely novel leaves a lasting impression.
Too often political leaders and media figures express utter bafflement when the citizens of Western nations become involved in Islamic terrorism. It doesn’t fit easy explanations, or offer obvious solutions like walls and travel bans. Home Fire comes at this story from a different angle: by focusing on the intersecting paths of the two British Pakistani families. For one group of siblings, their long-dead Jihadi father left a wound in their family, and each of them seeks to resolve that pain in different ways. In the other family, their father has guaranteed his ascendant political fortunes by adopting a hard-line anti-terrorist position, rejecting his Muslim upbringing and claiming only to be British, and expecting his children to follow loyally.
Based loosely on the Sophocles play Antigone, this beautiful, moving novel demands that you experience the terrible push and pull between an individual’s desires for success and love, and family legacies – obligations, religious responsibilities, and modes of honouring one’s forebears.