The Award Tally

Burnt Shadows

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Burnt Shadows was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. On a summer's day in 1953, a woman in a red dress climbs the stairs of a grand old house in Lahore to meet a man who has long haunted her imagination. Their meeting will have consequences that ripple across continents and decades, from the 1940s Hiroshima to the 1980s New York, from Cold War Moscow to contemporary Afghanistan. Kamila Shamsie's internationally acclaimed novel traces the intersecting lives of four characters bound together by chance and circumstance—connected by a single, devastating moment in history. Through the eyes of a German woman, her Pakistani lover, their son, and a young Afghan man, Shamsie reveals how the shadows cast by twentieth-century history shape the choices we make and the lives we lead. A sweeping narrative that moves between continents and time periods, Burnt Shadows is a profound meditation on the nature of love, loss, and redemption, and the ways in which personal histories are inextricably bound to the larger stories of nations and empires.

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Publisher
Bloomsbury Publishing
Year
2025
ISBN-13
9781526689535
Genre
Fiction
Topics
War and its aftermathIdentity and displacementFamily across generations

Awards

Other awarded books from Kamila Shamsie