Burnt Shadows

Product Description

In a prison cell in the US a man stands trembling naked fearfully waiting to be shipped to Guantanamo Bay. How did it come to this? he wonders. August 9th 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 & 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 she travels to Delhi two years later. There she walks into the lives of Konrads half-sister Elizabeth her husband James Burton & their employee Sajjad Ashraf from whom she starts to learn Urdu. As the years unravel new homes replace those left behind & 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 & the Tanakas as they are transported from Pakistan to New York & in the novels astonishing climax to Afghanistan in the immediate wake of 9/11. The ties that have bound them together over decades & generations are tested to the extreme with unforeseeable consequences. Sweeping in its scope & mesmerising in its evocation of time & place Burnt Shadows" is an epic narrative of disasters evaded & confronted loyalties offered & repaid & loves rewarded & betrayed."