Burnt Shadows

Synopsis: 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 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, she travels to Delhi two years later. 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 seamlessly usurped by new conflicts. But the shadows of history - personal, political - are cast over the entwined worlds of the Burtons, Ashrafs and the Tanakas as they are transported from Pakistan to New York, and in the novel's astonishing climax, to Afghanistan in the immediate wake of 9/11. The ties that have bound them together over decades and generations are tested to the extreme, with unforeseeable consequences. Sweeping in its scope and mesmerising in its evocation of time and place, "Burnt Shadows" is an epic narrative of disasters evaded and confronted, loyalties offered and repaid, and loves rewarded and betrayed.

Review: This book was lent to me by a neighbour and from the cover I didn't think it would be my kind of thing (actually after I'd read the book the cover bugged me even more.) The book is extremely ambitious, spanning decades and taking as it's backdrop the Nagasaki atomic bombing, Partition in India, 9/11 and the Afghanistan war and that is one of it's problems it's a little too ambitious and busy. These events are for the most part just backgrounds, they have an impact on the characters emotionally and physically but they are not explored in any great detail. When Hiroko (the main character and the one that remains in the book throughout) moves from Nagasaki after that 'unspeakable day' to Delhi I found myself wanting to stay and see how the country coped in the aftermath of such horror but the purpose of this story is to write about how people cope when faced with tragedy and displacement, how some triumph (or at least find a way of surviving) and how others falter and how all of this that can filter down and affect future generations.

If Hiroko was to turn up on your doorstep you might want to move out straight away as disaster seems to follow her around a bit but then, as we all know, man's appetite for war is unquenchable, and there's hardly a place she could go to on earth that hasn't had it's share of bloodshed. So back to the cover, Hiroko's father and fiancé are killed after the Nagasaki bomb falls and she herself is injured .. the kimono she is wearing melts into her back and she is left with burns shaped like birds from the pattern on her kimono ... lots of dead flesh and charred and puckered skin and this is what annoyed me about the winsome front cover .. I know it's only a representation and to realise it properly would have been gruesome but it cheapens her ordeal a bit and what's worse it's got a definite whiff of the Mills & Boon about it!! I've seen some beautiful covers for it since and wish that the story I'd read had been enclosed in one of them (because I'm ridiculously partial to nice covers.)

Anyway, back to the book, I won't go into detail as Waterstone's have written such a good synopsis (hurray, at last a 'fairly' short review.) I thought it was well written and interesting, there were parts of the story that bored me slightly and parts that confused but all in all I was gripped and the pages flew by. The ending was unexpected, there's a twist to the story which I didn't see coming (yeah .. I know .. no-one's surprised!) one to make you look for more pages in order to resolve it. It's half hinted at in the tiny prologue, there's a man taken to a cell and stripped naked, he suspects he will soon be wearing an orange jumpsuit, he wonders 'how did it come to this' but you don't know who he is or why he's in the cell .. you don't find out until the last few pages.

The book cover I liked more.