Home Fire
by Kamila Shamsie
Summary
Isma Pasha has spent her twenties raising her twin siblings in Wembley after their mother's death, their jihadi father having died en route to Guantánamo years before. Freed at last, she leaves for a doctorate in Massachusetts, where she meets Eamonn Lone, the charming, aimless son of Karamat Lone, Britain's new Home Secretary, a Muslim who has built his career on being harder on Muslims than anyone. Isma likes Eamonn more than she admits. Her beautiful sister Aneeka, back in London, does something sharper with him.
Because the twins have a brother problem. Parvaiz, Aneeka's twin, adrift and groomed with terrible skill by a recruiter who knew exactly which wound to press, their father's ghost, has gone to Raqqa to join the media wing of the caliphate, and regretted it almost at once. Aneeka's affair with the Home Secretary's son begins as strategy: Parvaiz wants to come home, and the man who decides whether Britons like him may come home is Eamonn's father. Karamat Lone strips Parvaiz's citizenship instead, and when the boy is shot dead trying to reach a consulate, the novel moves to its final act: Aneeka, on television, in a Karachi park, sitting with her brother's body, demanding his return to British soil, while the state and the news cycle decide what she is.
It is Antigone, openly: five acts, five voices, the unburied brother, the king who is also a father.
Around two hundred and eighty pages, fast and devastating.
Best for readers who want the tabloid war on terror decade turned back into tragedy, in the strict sense, where every actor has reasons and the machine kills them anyway.
Historical Context & Significance
Home Fire won the Women's Prize in 2018 and was longlisted for the Booker; the BBC later placed it among the hundred most influential novels. Kamila Shamsie conceived it when a theatre director suggested she look at Antigone, and the transposition works because the material was already tragic: Britain's citizenship stripping powers, expanded through the 2010s, created exactly Creon's instrument, and the novel arrived in print roughly a year and a half before the Shamima Begum case turned its plot into the news, an anticipation reviewers have marvelled at since.
Shamsie, born in Karachi and long resident in London, had been publishing since her twenties, with Burnt Shadows and A God in Every Stone building the reputation this book cashed; she wrote the Karamat Lone character before Britain had a Muslim Home Secretary, another anticipation the decade supplied.
The prize win was decisive for the book's standing, and it is now the standard fiction assignment on the citizenship debates it dramatised.