Wow!! What a story. What a feat of writing. I'm glad I know the story of Antigone though because I feel that I may have missed some of the nuance woven into this story without this knowledge. I can understand why some people didn't like this book but I really enjoyed it. Thank you for approving this title for me.

Thank god for the second half. For much of the book I was left wondering what I was missing after all of the praise that surrounds Home Fire. Yes, it is timely and essential in it's way. It's presentation of British Muslims as individuals rather than a monolith is essential and Shamsie looks at the nuances of faith, the points of contact between nationality and nationalism, the spectrum of traditionalism and integration. I learnt a lot from the situations she creates and the way these issues played out. And when it was good it was absolutely spell-binding. Parvaiz and Aneeka absolutely broke my heart and anyone who might wonder how a British-born individual could decide to join Daesh should read Parvaiz's section. I dithered between hateing Karamat and reluctantly seeing how he became the man who could make the decisions he did. But despite that gut-punch of an ending I wasn't satisfied overall because the novel felt unbalanced. Too much space was dedicated to Isma and Eamonn creating a long, slow and frankly not very interesting beginning that meant I had almost given up before the story really hit its stride. They are important characters for the story but they lacked the depth of Parvaiz and Aneeka and even Karamat and certainly didn't need as much space to achieve their purpose as they were given.The shallow romance between Eamonn and Aneeka that struggled to sustain the events that followed and that was in part because we saw less of Aneeka than Eamonn in it.

Home Fire is not perfect but the good bits were good enough to earn 4 stars, even if they were constricted by the weaknesses of the other sections. It's still and important book and we need more of stories like this.

I didn't like this one nearly as much as I expected to. It's an interesting retelling of Antigone but I just didn't like it. I didn't feel invested in the characters, I didn't like the way it all played out and it felt like the most interesting characters weren't featured as much as they should've been.

Kamila Shamsie’s A God in Every Stone was one of my top reads of 2015. In fact, I loved it so much I had mentally picked ‘Home Fire’ as the winner for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction before reading any of the shortlist. I’m willing to believe the judges were not working to quite my methodology, but there was no harm done in the end. Following our different reading schedules we all came to the same decision; ‘Home Fire’ is every bit as impressive as Shamsie’s previous novels and a thoroughly worthy winner of any and all accolades going.

Like so many novels published over the last few years, ‘Home Fire’ is a reworking of a famous classic text. The original in this case however is far older and, for me at least, more obscure than the Shakespeare and Austen updates with which we are all so familiar. Shamsie has taken the story of Antigone, a Greek tragedy with a Wikipedia summary so dense it took me multiple readings to make any sense of the characters’ names, actions and relationships to each other, and moved it to twenty-first Britain with breathtaking assurance.

For a start, the context of the original is some kind of ancient civil war (to quote Wikipedia, ‘Oedipus’s sons, Etocles and Polynices, had shared the rule jointly until they quarrelled, and Eteocles expelled his brother. In Sophocles’ account, the two brothers agreed to alternate rule each year, but Eteocles decided not to share power with his brother after his tenure expired. Polynices left the kingdom, gathered an army and attacked the city of Thebes in a conflict called the Seven Against Thebes. Both brothers were killed in the battle. King Creon, who has ascended to the throne of Thebes after the death of the brothers, decrees that Polynices is not to be buried or even mourned …) I suppose for those steeped in the Classics, the characters and settings of Antigone fit comfortably within a known narrative. By placing ‘Home Fire’ in the here and now, Shamsie gives her readers exactly that sense of understanding society, characters and nuance. The novel begins with the headscarf-wearing Isma missing her flight to the US from Britain, ‘The ticket wouldn’t be refunded because the airline took no responsibility for passengers who arrived at the airport three hours ahead of the departure time and were escorted to an interrogation room.‘ The familiar context of the War on Terror, Islamophobia and debates about citizenship and British national identity means ‘Home Fire’ pulls off the most difficult challenge of re-writing traditional stories. Rather than finding inventive ways of twisting them to fit a different setting, it utterly recasts its foundational material, helping us to understand the present day and the power of old stories by removing the comforting distance of time and space and making them immediate and unequivocally relevant.

There is absolutely no distance between recognisable, everyday life and the experiences of the characters in ‘Home Fire’. From Isma, the older sister, quietly confident with an identity which encompasses her strongly-held religious beliefs and academic ambitions to Karamat, the secular Muslim British MP with a very public stance against Terror, all the characters are fully formed; believable and tragic, they appear to be controlled by conventions, traditions and the media quite as much as their Greek counterparts were by fate.

‘Home Fire’ builds beautifully from its classical foundations, but it is a resolutely modern novel. If on first reading I was focusing on how it took on and worked with the traditional story of Antigone, I think on re-reading I’ll want to look harder at the ways it explores gender. (In a dry aside, we’re told how the young male characters struggle to learn how to be men because ‘For girls, becoming women was inevitability; for boys, becoming men was ambition.‘) That will be the future though, for now I will simply bask in satisfaction of reading such a successful novel. If I was blown away by the way in which Shamsie helped me understand the past in ‘A God in Every Stone’ I am no less impressed with the insight she has given me into the present in her latest literary triumph. ‘Home Fire’ is a novel for those who like the Classics and those drawn to the contemporary, those who wish to understand ancient stories and those who want to explore twenty-first century society. It is a novel for anyone who wants to see what the very best of modern fiction has to offer; from Shamsie, I would expect nothing less.

Read this for Brown Girls Book Club; a hugely evocative read, terrifyingly pertinent and and a powerful story of fractured families.

Knowing the story of Antigone adds an element of foreshadowing but not so much that it takes away from the poignancy of the story.

This was totally engrossing right from the start - tense, poignant and thought provoking. The story of fracturing sibling relationships is carefully balanced by the presentation of Islamic extremism, prejudice against Muslims and various characters struggling to live as both British and Muslim in the 21st century.

Knowing the story of Antigone perhaps added an element of foreshadowing, but I think the book would be equally enjoyable for those who don’t know it.

Shamsie’s retelling of Sophocles’s Antigone,, centered on the British Muslim community, is absolutely inspired. Though perhaps I’d better revise cast names before continuing.

King Creon = The British Muslim Home Secretary
Haemon, Creon’s son and Antigone’s fiancé = Eamonn, the Home Secretary’s Son
Ismene = Isma, the elder daughter of a Muslim family, who has brought up her younger twins. Devout.
Polyneices = Parvaiz – Isma’s younger brother, who becomes radicalised, leaves the country to join ISIS
Antigone = Aneeka, Parvaiz’s twin sister. Independent, strong-willed, emancipated.

You can see from that list, the potential for a series of ideological clashes and a fertile space for Shamsie to explore contemporary issues and debates taking place in Britain today. Some of the questions raised: If you learn that one of your relatives has joined ISIS, do you inform the authorities, even if the potential cost is a rift in your own family? Isma does, and that is the price she pays. If you leave the country to join ISIS, have you rescinded your right to return – even as a corpse. Parvaiz. How hard would you fight for the repatriation of your dead relative? Aneeka.

You might think the answers to these questions are cut and dried, but could there ever be other factors that would make you reconsider? Shamsie’s narrative is designed to do just that, without shirking unpalatable realities. Divided into sections told from the varying characters’ points of view, we see behind the actions into the real motivations. And the face of betrayal is constantly being redrawn. Is it turning your relatives over to the authorities? Is it the cynical radicalisation of a young boy who has yet to find his place in society? Or is it the entrapment of the Home Secretary’s son in a lurid sexual affair with the intention of enlisting his aid in getting your brother home?

The older generation has its problems too. The Home Secretary has to walk a tightrope, with the impossible task of not offending the diverse communities he serves. And what he is to do when he discovers his son’s relationship with the sister of a known terrorist? This is also a neat mirroring of Creon’s dilemma, because in Sophocles he, at first tries to save his niece. And so the Home Secretary tries to save his son. But circumstances dictate otherwise. Another state becomes involved, the all-seeing press. And to confound it all, the relationship between Eamonn and Aneeka has grown into something more than lust. The danger in the modern world is that there is always someone or something willing to capitalise on any situation.

The dye is cast. The ball will roll right to the tragic and unforgettable end.

Shamsie’s novel is explosive in more ways than one.

Kamila Shamsie's modern retelling of Antigone, focusing on the radicalisation of a young London teenager. It is thought provoking, moving and beautifully crafted and works whether or not young Sophocles original story.

‘You know what fathers and sons are like.’
‘Not really, no.’
‘They’re our guides into manhood, for starters […] We want to be like them; we want to be better than them. We want to be the only people in the world who are allowed to be better than them.’

Home Fire begins from the perspective of one of the women. Isma is about to miss her flight to America where she has a place to do a PhD in sociology at Amherst. She’s been detained by immigration in the UK who search and interrogate her. ‘He wanted to know her thoughts on Shias, homosexuals, the Queen, democracy, the Great British Bake Off, the invasion of Iraq, Israel, suicide bombers, dating websites.’ Eventually she’s allowed to leave but not before she’s missed her flight.

Eventually Isma arrives in Massachusetts where she meets Eamonn Lone, son of the British politician Karamat Lone. Isma recognises Eamonn. When she was younger there was a photograph of the local cricket team in the house of a family friend. Karamat Lone was on it. Isma overheard her grandmother telling someone of the cruelty he’d shown their family when he could’ve acted otherwise. However, Isma doesn’t reveal to Eamonn that she knows who he is and a relationship begins to develop between them.

Isma’s family situation is complicated. Her mother and grandmother died within a year, leaving her to parent her twelve-year-old twin siblings, Aneeka and Parvaiz. Aneeka is at home in London, attending college. Parvaiz has left, occasionally letting Aneeka know via Skype messages that he’s okay.

Shamsie intertwines the two families in order to explore relationships, love and loyalty. Through the range of characters, she creates a complex view of what it means to be a Muslim, exploring different perspectives within Muslim communities. This is at its most stark with Karamat Lone and Aneeka. Lone is known as Lone Wolf due to his championing by the tabloids who see him ‘as a lone crusader taking on the backwardness of British Muslims’. Not long after his appointment as Home Secretary, he returns to the secondary school he attended in Bradford to give a speech.

‘You are, we are, British. Britain accepts this. So do most of you. But for those of you who are in some doubt about it, let me say this: don’t set yourselves apart in the way you dress, the way you think, the outdated codes of behaviour you cling to, the ideologies to which you attach your loyalties. Because if you do, you will be treated differently – not because of racism, though that does still exist, but because you insist on your difference from everyone else in this multi-ethnic, multitudinous United Kingdom of ours. And look at all you miss out on because of it.’

Aneeka wears the hijab, prays and is teetotal. She’s also about to enter Lone’s life and have a profound effect.

Home Fire is a retelling of the Greek tragedy Antigone. While a number of recent retellings of Greek and Shakespearean plays have fallen short, Shamsie pulls this one off with aplomb. The novel uses the key themes and follows the structure of the source play but its characters, settings and ideas are contemporary and highly relevant. As the story moves from character to character – Isma, Eamonn, Parvaiz, Anneka, Karamat – the sense of urgency builds. Home Fire is a compelling, tightly crafted novel; I read it in one sitting.

Kamila Shamsie's extraordinary and engrossing novel “Home Fire” is in many ways about getting beneath the surface of headlines to show the complexity of people, situations and otherness. This is the story of a family that has been splintered apart. Isma Pasha took responsibility for raising her younger twin siblings after their mother's early death and the disappearance of their father. The novel begins with Isma finally taking steps to live her own life and continue her education in America now that her brother Parvaiz and sister Aneeka are older. But Parvaiz's disconnection with his own family's past leads him into a dangerous situation. Paired with this family's story is that of Karamat Lone, a man who has been appointed the British Home Secretary and his son Eamonn. Karamat has gained political clout by spouting rhetoric that will gain him favour with white conservatives. But Eamonn's involvement with the Pasha family leads Karamat into a situation where he must choose between family and his political ambition. Shamsie subtly reworks the story and ideas of the Greek tragedy Antigone into a contemporary landscape where the question of national identity has become so divisive. It's a dramatic and engaging tale that totally gripped me.

Although I've read this novel several months after it was first published its subject matter is still striking relevant. On the morning that I finished reading this book I opened BBC News to see a story about two British-born men who joined the Islamic State and had their British citizenship revoked. One thread of Shamsie's story parallels such an instance, but gets behind the sensationalist and fearmongering media headlines where people have been demonized as terrorists or sluts to deal with the complexity of individual experience. It also opens with the very real experience that many people of Middle Eastern descent face when travelling between Britain and America where they are subjected to extensive searches at the airport. This made me recall Riz Ahmed's powerful essay in the anthology “The Good Immigrant” about the self consciousness and sense of guilt this induces. “Home Fire” shows up how British politicians often speak about cross-cultural respect and inclusivity, but many legal practices and procedures encourage division and induce feelings of otherness.

However, an interesting issue came up for me since I happened to read this novel directly after reading Ahmed Saadawi's “Frankenstein in Baghdad” which is on the longlist for the Man Booker International Prize. I like to follow prize lists so I'm trying to read some titles from this as well as all the books on the longlist for the Women's Prize for Fiction. But it struck me how major plot lines for both these novels are about terrorism and of their respective prize lists they are the only titles by authors of Middle Eastern descent. This raises a question for me about representation since it seems striking that the only novels by Middle Eastern writers that are being lauded in these British prizes are about headline issues. The same could be said about the 2017 Booker Prize longlist which Shamsie was also nominated for alongside Mohsin Hamid whose novel “Exit West” is about immigration.

I'm not criticising these authors for their choice of topics or story lines. All three of these novels are excellent in their own right, include dynamic individual characters and explore things other than these headline issues. And I'm not trying to lambast these prizes or the publishing industry. Perhaps it's simply a coincidence that these prize-nominated books are dealing with topics that many Westerns instantly associate with Middle Eastern countries and people of Middle Eastern descent. And in many ways these novels powerfully show the complexity behind these topics. It just makes me question why we're not also celebrating and reading more Middle Eastern authors who write about different aspects of Muslim and Middle Eastern life. One of the things I most admired about Elif Shafak's recent novel “Three Daughters of Eve” was its portrayal of very different kinds of young Muslim women in Britain. As a reader, I'd like more of this and a greater plurality of literature. I hope to read more books that show multifaceted aspects of BAME communities and individuals. I spoke about this in my recent Reading Wrap Up video and asked for more book recommendations so I'm pleased to see several comments from people suggesting more Middle Eastern literature. This is just something I thought worth pointing out since I read “Home Fire” in this particular context. Completely aside from this or maybe because it vigorously deals with such topical issues, I think Kamila Shamsie's novel is incredibly distinct, beautifully written and an extraordinarily engaging story.

Home Fire is a retelling of Sophocles’s Antigone, but I read it without brushing up on the older story, and can confirm that it didn’t noticeably hamper my experience to read it simply as a hyper-contemporary literary political novel. Shamsie uses five point-of-view characters: Isma, the daughter of a jihadi who died on the way to Guantanamo, who has been supporting her younger siblings for years and is now—freed by their accession to adulthood—starting a PhD program in the States; Aneeka, her passionate and beautiful younger sister; Parvaiz, Aneeka’s fraternal twin, desperate for direction about how to be a man; Karamat Lone, a Home Secretary of Pakistani origin whose hard-line stance on Muslims and immigration has been at the centre of much controversy; and Karamat’s son Eamonn, born into privilege, who becomes Aneeka’s lover. As the story progresses, each character gives us their own perspective on the issues of freedom, citizenship, love and duty that the story circles.

Much of the negative commentary I’ve seen about Home Fire has focused on Shamsie’s construction of these characters: they’ve most often been called “one-dimensional”, “stereotypical” or “flat”. I would contend that this is a reductive way of reading, not a quality inherent to the characters. Take Aneeka, for instance: a devout nineteen-year-old Muslim who prays at dawn, has extra-marital sex, and makes her hijab the last thing her lover is allowed to take off. Take Isma: both sister and mother to her siblings, the proverbial “strong woman”, yet too afraid, when she finally launches into the world, to make the first move towards a man who attracts her. These are unusual women, unusual heroines, especially of contemporary literature; they are serious and convicted. Their faith is significant to them, and therefore must be taken seriously by the reader. Their wounds are not merely personal; they have inherited distrust and division, their father’s death as a terrorist in captivity marking them out permanently to the governments of the West as Persons Of Interest. The Pasha siblings are slightly cold fish, but that’s the point: when you live under the weight of suspicion from everyone around you, for things you didn’t even do, that happens. (Aneeka speaks, sarcastically, of the dangers of Googling While Muslim.) It is not, I think, the sort of dynamic we are accustomed to. We tend to want our heroines feisty—or failing that, broken, but, you know, picturesquely. (Whitely. Middle class-ly.)

I’ve long been suspicious that people who find novels “too political” are people who don’t need to think about politics all the time. Lots of us would love not to have to politicise everything, but our lives and opinions are valued at a lower price, and so everything is political; when you struggle to thrive in a society that mistrusts, scorns, or blames you, life itself is a political act. I’m white and well-educated, but I’m also female and disabled. There are elements of daily living that are a constant uphill struggle for me: balancing meals and a social life with medication and self-care. Convincing a GP to change my prescriptions when things aren’t working. Getting a pharmacist to re-dispense that prescription when it hasn’t come through for seventy-two hours and I no longer have enough insulin to last through the night. I don’t talk to anyone about these things—partly because they are quotidian for me, and partly because no one else I know will really have had that experience.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that Home Fire’s “political” nature is necessary, inherent even, to telling a story about a Muslim family in contemporary Britain. Of course not every Muslim family has a brother who runs away to join IS, or a father who died on the way from Bagram to Guantanamo. But the constant surveillance of the state, particularly the eyes that are fixed upon Muslim children lest they show the slightest sign of the dreaded radicalisation—that is a reality for so many immigrants to this country, and it’s foolish to be surprised by how abundantly clear Shamsie makes that fact. Googling While Muslim is the least of it. Visas can be refused, careers cut short, degrees torpedoed. When Parvaiz is a little boy, the Pashas are visited by a man from the security services who takes from Parvaiz’s bedroom the only thing he has from his father: a photograph album containing pictures of Adil Pasha toting guns in Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, and inscribed When you’re older, son. After the story’s first tragedy, this same security officer is interviewed on television: he describes that visit and that album, and suggests it’s a shame that Child Protection Services weren’t involved immediately. Nowhere do we see that officer—or the country he works for—offer Parvaiz, and his sisters and mother, anything substantial—no financial assistance, no mentoring, no help obtaining apprenticeships or scholarships—in return for what is taken from them in dignity and in trust.

So much for the emotional potency of Home Fire, which even its detractors have admitted is one of its strengths; what of its weaknesses? Shamsie’s prose is capable, but often slides into melodrama. Especially in dialogue and at the ends of chapters, she has a tendency to seek significance and profundity for every plot point. In fact, the whole book skirts melodrama almost as a matter of course. (It’s based on a Greek tragedy; how could it not?) Some credibility is lost with Aneeka’s mad vigil over Parvaiz’s body in the park, with Eamonn’s wild flight to find her there, and with the last two pages in their entirety. (Some of this is down to the fact that Aneeka and Eamonn are, at least to me, not especially credible lovers. Eamonn’s and Isma’s interactions, showcased by the misdirection at the beginning of the book, are much more interesting.) Karamat Lone, also, is a little too purely villainous to be convincing, despite Shamsie loading him with a backstory that at least makes sense of his stubborn championing of assimilation. (That said, the shenanigans that Theresa May pulled when Home Secretary, particularly towards LGBTQ asylum-seekers, are almost enough to make Lone look eminently reasonable and pleasant.)

For all that, I still think it’s an incredibly important book, and the fact that it’s set so firmly in the present day—engaging so firmly with present-day concerns—doesn’t diminish it, but instead makes it essential reading. Shamsie is presenting a world here that many of her readers will never be forced to engage with or have to navigate; we can choose to read this story or to put it aside. It is a story fraught with fear and tension and the possibility of betraying someone no matter what you do, and the fact that it is being billed as a retelling of an ancient Greek tale suggests to me that its significance will not fade as its cultural referents do. It does deserve to be on the Man Booker Prize longlist; it also deserves to be widely read.

Please read my full review at the following link: http://www.narrativemuse.co/books/home-fire/

Kamila Shamsie’s latest novel is a nuanced and intelligent exploration of the place of Muslims in an often hostile world and what it means to try to be a good Muslim when faith, family, loyalty and society all come into conflict. It draws its inspiration from Sophocles’ Antigone, a young girl who rebels against the dictates of the state to bury her dead brother. I didn't realise this before I read the novel and I don’t think it is in fact necessary to refer back to the original story – the book works perfectly well without knowing it, as the dilemma is applicable to any era. The novel centres around two British Muslim families. Isma, Aneeka and Parvaiz are siblings whose Jihadi father disappeared on his way to Guantanamo. The Lanes are the face of assimilation, with the father being Home Secretary and an anti-terrorist campaigner. The fate of the two families becomes inextricably linked after Aneeka starts an affair with the Lone son Eamonn after her brother Parvaiz becomes radicalised and joins ISIS. Loyalties are compromised, the conflict between state law and religious law becomes problematic, and the very nature of citizenship comes under the microscope. What happens if someone has been stripped of their citizenship but then dies abroad? What happens to grief and the longing to bury the body? How are young people radicalized and how does it affect their families? These are complex issues and Shamsie uses the two families to examine them cleverly and successfully. However, I felt ultimately that this was an issue-driven book and the characters never fully came alive for me. Each seemed to be demonstrating an idea or an ideology rather than being fully-rounded characters and I didn’t warm to any of them. For me this detracted from my involvement as I remained unengaged on a human level. Nevertheless I found the book thought-provoking and challenging, and a very enjoyable read.

Beautifully written and moving story. The impact a father's choice to become a radical Islamist has on his wife and family and the choices they make. Sad, shocking, thought-provoking.

And if you have no place within you to call home……….

Kamila Shamsie’s thoughtful, immersive, disturbing book starts with an emotional punch, and does not let up

Isma is a British Muslim. She is on her way to take up an academic post in Massachusetts. And is stuck in interrogation at the airport :

“Isma was going to miss her flight. The ticket wouldn’t be refunded because the airline took no responsibility for passengers who arrived at the airport three hours ahead of the departure time and were escorted to an interrogation room……She’d made sure not to pack anything that would invite comment or questions – no Quran, no family pictures, no books on her areas of academic interest…The interrogation continued for nearly two hours. He wanted to know her thoughts on Shias, homosexuals, the Queen, democracy, the Great British Bake Off, the invasion of Iraq, Israel, suicide bombers, dating websites”

Shamsie immediately drops the reader into the experience of being regarded with suspicion, because of ethnicity

Home Fire is on one level just a very human story about a family, and a love story. Older sister Isma takes up her academic position in the States. She meets a vibrant, interesting fellow academic whose path kind of crossed her family’s, back in her teens. Ayman has become Eamonn ‘so that people would know the father had integrated’…his Irish-American wife was seen as another indicator of this integrationist posing rather than an explanation for the son’s name.

Isma and Ayman/Eamonn become friends, though Isma finds herself harbouring deeper feelings for the man whose affection for her is merely brotherly.

Isma is the plainer, studious eldest sister, who has become surrogate mother to her younger siblings, twins Aneeka, fiery, creative, beautiful, and her less sure, less confident brother Parvaiz.

Circumstances will bring Aneeka and Ayman together, initially without Isma’s knowledge, and a story of the love, jealousy and heartache will play out.

But this is far more than a kind of fairy story of the prettier youngest sister. There are deceptions, deliberate obfuscations and a distinct sense of always living with the potential of menace and misunderstanding because of the real history and the perceived history of race and religion

Parvaiz has vanished, and is not spoken about. He is a family secret, and what has happened to him is on one level obvious.

Isma’s family has a past regarded as suspect. Eamonn/Ayman’s family has integrated so well that his father became an MP. But at the end of the day, integrated or not, ‘identity’ will be recognised by appearance.

This is a hugely uncomfortable (in the very best way) read. It made me feel long and hard about identity. Many of us trace our complex history back with pride, discovering perhaps a history of different European immigrations across the centuries. But where geography is written in skin colour, assumptions, not our own, will be made about who we are.

I shall certainly read more of Shamsie. On this showing, she enters into the psyches of a range of characters, and, whatever the positions, we do get presented with the human complexity within

One of the strands within this book is a working of the story of Antigone, whose dead brother is denied burial, on the grounds of being seen as a traitor. To be honest, as someone drawn to Greek myth and history, it was one of the reasons I requested this title, but the connections are there if you wish to acknowledge them, but do not in any way reduce the power of the book’s effect upon the reader if you don’t. All it really shows is that these ancient myths and histories have their uneasy power to move us because we seem to repeat our history, with different names, but, effectively unchanging motifs, across the millenia

I received this as an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley

Home Fire tells the story of Pakistani siblings and the trials they have been put through, from the death of their mother and grandmother and then finding the truth about their father. The story tackles the sensitive issue of terrorism in the UK and in Syria and the emotional and psychological effects it can have on family members and the wider public. What I found interesting was the flip side of how the British MPs try to deal with issue of those that leave to fight in Syria and then wish to return, as well as the point of view of those that went out to fight, and the reality they discover.
I thought the book was written well, it pulled you in to the swirling world of the dramatic lives of the characters which sadly is something that the modern world knows too well.

I thought this was absolutely excellent. I had to be persuaded to read it because the idea of an updated Antigone about terrorism, radicalisation and its consequences didn't appeal at all. In fact, I found it gripping, convincing and very moving as well as saying important things about modern Britain – and the world.

The story is told successively from several points of view, which worked very well for me. We have members of the Muslim Pasha family in North London plus a Muslim Home Secretary, determined to show the world that he is tough on radical Islam, and his son who becomes involved with the Pasha family. I won't give any spoilers, but what emerges is beautifully evoked responses from all the characters involved, whose internal lives are convincing and vividly real. The complexities, deceits and decencies of what happens are exceptionally well done, and I found the whole thing completely involving and ultimately extremely moving.

Kamila Shamsie writes beautifully. Her prose is extremely readable and simply carried me along. She creates some beautiful, evocative sentences; for example: "The sky was a rich blue, the water surged like blood leaving a heart, a lean young man from a world very distant from hers was waiting for her to walk back to him." Or: "Months after their mother died, Parvaiz, a boy suddenly arrived into adolescence in a house where bills and grief filled all crevices…" It's wonderful writing.

I was surprised by how very much I liked this book. It's one of the best I've read for some time, and warmly recommended.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

A stunning, eloquent, blazing novel that will immediately be pressed into the hands of another upon finishing. Home Fires is truly a modern masterpiece; a gut-wrenching howl more powerful than anything I've read in years.

The seventh novel by Pakistan-born London resident Kamila Shamsie, a former Granta Best Of Young British novelist, feels particularly relevant to our world today. Perhaps more than the other Man Booker longlisted novels I’ve read so far this feels especially for our times, with the most relevance to our modern lives. Strange then, that this is based upon one of the oldest recorded stories, the Greek myth of Antigone, most famously written as a tragic play by Sophocles in about 442 BC.
I didn’t know the myth beforehand and I’m actually rather glad I didn’t, although it did make me want to seek it out once I’d finished Shamsie’s adaptation. I went with one of her recommended versions and listened on spoken word CD to another 2017 Man Booker longlisted author Ali Smith who narrates her children’s book “The Story Of Antigone” (2013). In an interview following the story she says of this source material;
“It’s the kind of story that will always be relevant for all sorts of reasons because some things never change no matter what century we’re in and no matter where we are in history and it is a story about what matters to human beings and how human beings make things meaningful and how we act towards one another and what power is, what it makes us do and how much or how little power human beings really have.”
I’m not actually going to tell you more about the myth as it will give too much information as to where Shamsie’s plot-line will go. If you know it, you know it. If not I don’t want to spoil things for you as developments certainly took me by surprise. It does involve a chilling attempt to stand up against the authorities.
Shamsie has recast the main characters as a Muslim family from Wembley. Isma, the oldest daughter begins the novel by travelling to the US to commence a long-delayed Sociology PHD leaving her younger law student sister Aneeka at home and Aneeka’s twin brother Parvaiz removed from the family. Isma had been a mother figure to the twins after they were orphaned. We learn early on that their father had died whilst being transferred to Guantanamo Bay.
Isma is attempting to pick up the pieces after family tragedies and the shame and distrust caused. She has a chance encounter with a family acquaintance, Eammon, son of a British Muslim politician whose career, after setbacks, is in the ascendancy. On Eamonn’s return to the UK he offers to take a bag of M&M’s to Aneeka setting up a catalogue of events which will lead to tragedy and a startling international incident.
I read very few books as explicitly political as this and did find it difficult to hone in as to what my feelings were or the author’s stance on incidents. This is because the issues are extremely complex and involves the prejudices of nations, the power of religions and the media. Shamsie is certainly to be applauded for her bravery in tackling these themes head-on. The fact that she does it pitch-perfectly in a tale which is brilliantly realised, both unpredictable and chillingly inevitable borders on the extraordinary. I found it totally compelling to read but harder to always gauge my responses. Shamsie is educating, entertaining and gripping her readers in a manner which explores the potential of the plot in eye-opening, thought-provoking ways. This feels like a very important novel for our times and yet has an age-old story as its framework. Although I wasn’t aware of the relevance to Antigone as I was reading, it does give the work resonance and great authority. So here we have it, my first 5 star Man Booker longlist read. The battle is on…………..

I do not believe I will read a better novel than Home Fire this year. Kamila Shamsie has taken the age old story of Antigone and has demonstrated how ageless are its themes. Where myth is so often concerned with heroism, glory and honour, Greek tragedy focused rather on the family dynamics of the hero within the home. The author recognises this and peels away the external skin to reveal the tragic consequences of radicalisation, jihadism as well as state reaction for two Moslem families in England. I wondered (knowing the Antigone myth so well) whether the plot would suffer through predictability or artifice; but no. This version is a terrific story in its own right, moving and original, which also pays sly reference to other versions, such as Heaney’s Burial at Thebes.