Sweeping in scope and mesmerizing in its evocation of time and place, Burnt Shadows is an epic narrative of disasters elided and confronted, loyalties offered and repaid, and loves rewarded and betrayed.

August 9, 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 realization. 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, Hiroko 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 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.

Excerpt

Konrad walks across Urakami Valley, his heart folding in and in on itself.

Hiroko steps out onto the veranda. Her body from the neck down a silk column, white withthree black cranes swooping across her back. She looks out towards the mountains, and everything is more beautiful to her than it was early this morning. Nagasaki is more beautiful to her than ever before. She turns her head and sees the spires of Urakami Cathedral which Konrad is looking up at when he notices a gap open between the clouds. Sunlight streams through, pushing the clouds apart even further.

Hiroko.

And then the world goes white.

"Shamsie takes readers on a tour de force in this examination of the impact of war, following a trajectory from the devastation of Nagasaki in WWII through the conflict-ridden formation of Pakistan in the late 1940s to post-9/11 Manhattan and war-torn Afghanistan. Konrad Weiss, living in Nagasaki in the summer of 1945, hires a local woman, Hiroko Tanaka, to help him write a book about the city. The romance that blossoms is cut short when the atom bomb falls, killing Konrad, and after a while, Hiroko, feeling she can no longer stay in her country, travels to India to find Konrad's sister, Ilse, the wife of a British lawyer enjoying the privileges of the British raj's final days. From there, Shamsie brilliantly interweaves the lives of an array of characters as she brings the story forward to the 1980s, then to the beginning of the 21st century, exploring the clashes between loyalty to family, homeland and cause. Shamsie's unsparing look at how individuals respond when war affects their world makes for an intriguing, heartrending tale of human connection." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Burnt Shadows," by Kamila Shamsie, a Pakistani novelist who writes in English, comes to us from England, where it has recently been named a finalist for the Orange Prize. It's a historical novel with the very highest intentions, asking the question: How has the modern world gotten itself to the edge of nuclear annihilation?

Shamsie's answer may or may not sound accurate, depending... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) upon your own view. The world has been cursed, she suggests, since America dropped not one but two atomic bombs, first on Hiroshima, then — gratuitously? — on Nagasaki, in the summer of 1945.

That unspeakably awful twin event has always been complicated by questions of race. America would never have done such a thing, some people have said, to the Germans; Caucasian lives would never have been submitted to such an experiment.

Hiroko Tanaka is a young woman living in Nagasaki during that portentous summer. She is in love with Konrad Weiss, an idealistic German artist and scholar whose work attempts to discover how Eastern and Western civilizations might learn to live in harmony. Fate doesn't treat this young man very well; within the first few pages of the novel nothing is left of him but a scorched shadow etched on a large rock. At the time of the attack, Hiroko was wearing a kimono with black cranes on its back; she will carry the burned imprint of those birds for the rest of her life.

Within a couple of years, Hiroko, who can no longer endure Japan or her position in it, journeys to New Delhi to visit Konrad's half sister, Ilse, who is married to James Burton, a slimy British attorney who has been living as one of the ruling elite as the Raj crumbles around him. His solace and comfort come from emotionally swindling an impossibly handsome and good-hearted young Muslim man, Sajjad Ashraf, who has been euchred into thinking he's somehow studying for the law when he's actually employed to play chess with Burton. (The author might not like to hear this, but Burton is a photocopy of Mr. Wilcox in "Howard's End," unscrupulous, bestially cunning. He lets the devil take the hindmost — in this case, every person of a different color or belief than his own.)

It doesn't give away the plot to say that — against all odds and probabilities — the bereft Hiroko and the pure-hearted Sajjad fall in love. The British, meanwhile, having extracted everything they could from India, make a hasty retreat. Partition ensues; Hiroko and Sajjad end up in Karachi. Their dreams have taken a beating, but they have each other.

But this tale of oppression and emotional swindling, of running roughshod over people of other colors, is just beginning. The Burtons have a son, Henry, who moves to America and changes his name to Harry (read: Harry Truman, who made the decision to drop those bombs). The British empire turns American. Harry Burton becomes a member of the CIA and then a private mercenary. He manages to capture the trust and affection of young Raza, the mixed-race son of Hiroko and Sajjad. Raza possesses an uncanny gift for languages — he and his mother speak Japanese, English, German and Urdu on a regular basis — and although he has some trouble making a place for himself in Pakistan, he has only to cross the Afghan border to be thought of as a native tribesman, because of his almond eyes, his high cheekbones and his amazing command of the language. Soon Harry Burton and Raza are romping about in the mountains of Afghanistan, first stamping out the Soviets, then advancing American interests.

After a tragedy, the beleaguered Hiroko moves to New York City to live with Ilse, who has divorced her awful husband. Hiroko is now in her 70s, Ilse in her 90s. The Burton dynasty has produced another reptilian creature: a daughter named Kim (just so we'll remember Kipling and his dreams of empire). This woman thoughtlessly commits a final, ghastly sin against Hiroko's family, based on race, self-interest and primitive stupidity.

I could say that the first third of this novel is far more believable than the last two, or that the author stumbles when she attempts to create conversation between elderly women or Afghan tribesmen or American mercenaries. But the real problem is that "Burnt Shadows" is a novel of argument. Her argument is that the British and American empires, through their conscienceless colonialism (and particularly America's use of the bomb), are responsible for the very troubled world we live in today.

After Kim Burton delivers the final coup de grace to Hiroko and her loved ones, Hiroko can only say, "You are the kindest, most generous woman I know. But right now, because of you, I understand for the first time how nations can applaud when their governments drop a second nuclear bomb." There's something quite wacky about that sentence. First, Kim Burton, outside of offering Hiroko a cup of hot chocolate, has been neither kind nor generous. Second, there aren't any "governments" that have dropped a second atomic bomb. There's only the United States.

You can pick holes in this three-generational tale of white oppression, but you can't argue with deeply held beliefs. This is what a Pakistani novelist, Kamila Shamsie, believes. It's instructive to read this, on many levels.

Reviewed by Carolyn See, who can be reached at www.carolynsee.com, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"The most ambitious novel yet by this talented writer. In Burnt Shadows, Kamila Samsie casts her imagination remarkably far and wide, through time and across continents."--Mohsin Hamid

"Kamila Shamsie is a writer of immense ambition and strength. She understands a great deal about the ways in which the world's many tragedies and histories shape one another, and about how human beings can try to avoid being crushed by their fate and can discover their humanity, even in the fiercest combat zones of the age. Burnt Shadows is an absorbing novel that commands, in the reader, a powerful emotional and intellectual response."--Salman Rushdie

"Burnt Shadows is audacious in its ambition, epic in its scope. A startling expansion of the author's intentions, imagination and craftsmanship. One can only admire the huge advances she has made, and helped us to make, in understanding the new global tensions."--Anita Desai

"One of the finest writers at work anywhere, period . . . A great, absorbing novel, one that will be with us a long time."--Rick Simonson, Elliot Bay Book Company

"Kamila Shamsie opens a vista onto the century we have just lived through--pointing out its terror and its solace. She is so extraordinary a writer that she also offers hints about the century we are living through--the dark corners that contain challenges, as well as the paths that lead to beauty's lair."--Nadeem Aslam, author of Maps for Lost Lovers