In a prison cell in the US, 2002, a man stands trembling, naked, fearfully waiting to be shipped to Guantanamo Bay. How did it come to this? he wonders ...
9 August 1945, Nagasaki. Hiroko Tanaka steps out on to 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 and 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, two years later Hiroko travels to Delhi. 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 usurped by new conflicts. But the shadows of history - personal and political - are cast over the entwined worlds of the Burtons, the Ashrafs and the Tanakas, as they are transported from Pakistan to New York and, in the novel's climax, to Afghanistan in the immediate wake of 9/11. The ties that have bound these families together over decades and generations are tested to the extreme, with unforseeable consequences.
Burnt Shadows is an epic narrative of disasters evaded and confronted, loyalties offered and repaid, and loves rewarded and betrayed.
A powerful, sweeping epic crossing generations, cultures and continents
