BURNT SHADOWS by Kamila Shamsie

I read Home Fires a year or so ago, loved it, one of my favourite reads of that year - very powerful, beautiful, heart rending, a terrible commentary on the world we live in with divided religions, cultures, expectations. So I saw this one in an op shop and at such a ridiculously low price I just had to take it. Written some 8 years earlier than Home Fires, this novel has much the same themes - cultural and religious differences, terrible conflicts, the tragedies of what has happened to countries decimated by Britain and the US - Japan, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan. The usual casualties of Western domination in the twentieth century. 

This story follows two families - one German/English and the other Indian. They are brought together by a young Japanese woman, Hiroko. In 1945 Hiroko lives in Nagasaki. She is 22, and in love with a young German, Konrad, who is an English tutor. The bomb is dropped, Konrad is killed, Hiroko scarred for life, but survives. With nothing and no one left for her in Japan, two years later she has made her way to Delhi, where Konrad's sister Ilsa is married to her very English husband James Burton. Right on the cusp of Partition, Hiroko finds herself drawn to James' Muslim Indian assistant Sajjad Ashraf. Then a betrayal, more violence, more tragedy. The story then moves to Karachi, in the newly created Pakistan. Hiroko and Sajjad are married, and have a son, the apple of their eye, on whom all their hopes and aspirations rest. Into their lives comes the son of Ilsa and James, having spent a large part of his childhood in India, he is strongly drawn to the sub continent. And things just go from bad to worse. The story finishes in the US/Canada, with a further tragic betrayal, brought on by the extreme paranoia and nationalism after the Twin Tower bombings in 2001. 

Hiroko is the centre character of the story, it beginning and ending with her. She lives through so much horror, pain, tragedy and is a survivor, such a strong person, always hopeful. But things keep getting in the way. 

These are stories and plot lines that will never go out of fashion or relevance. As long as we have differences in skin colour, religion, the way cultures and peoples do things differently, then we will continue to have these  terrible stories being told. Just as relevant now as in 2009.