Yessss! International PEN's Free the word book club is excellent! It has given me insight on the nature of contemporary literature and some of the conflicts faced. As someone who is excited by this,I read these details of the current novels and plan to find them when I can. The literature in the contemporary period reflects the state of the world. It is full of war,conflict,the effects of capitalism and struggles for independance,and to create and maintain national,religious,economic,sexual etc identity. Conteporary literature as I have come across it many times especially of what I have read on interantional PEN is a huge struggle for IDENTITY. Sadly it has also been evident that the literature of our time is facing strutiny and threats to expression with censorship,banning and the persection of authors more than I have ever heard before. If you read of the authors of the past who expressed themselves about political and social issues:the authors,poets,journalists and those who express themselves with the word have never been so under attack. This worries and disturbs me that expression is under attack more these days. This novel seems like a very interesting and insightful one. It seems to consist of the conflicts of today.A deatiled analysis of the book can be found on the respective International PEN web-site page. ENJOY 
Guliz Sahdur
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BURNT SHADOWS
KAMILA SHAMSIE
(International PEN)
July 2009: Kamila Shamsie's 'Burnt Shadows'
Burnt Shadows is the second book in our Free the Word! World Book Club series. The novel covers nearly seven decades where the story sweeps from Nagasaki to Delhi, Karachi, the Pakistani-Afghan frontier, New York, Canada and Cuba, taking in key points in history including the bombing of Nagasaki, Partition in India, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and the aftermath of 9/11. With a prologue set in present-day Guantanamo Bay, an unidentified character asks: How did it come to this? - a question that is gradually revealed to the reader over the course of this extraordinary novel.
The opening chapters are set in Nagasaki in 1945, and follow the love story of the central character Hiroko Tanaka and a young German writer, Konrad Weiss. When Konrad is killed by the devastating flash of light which burns the birds on Hiroko's kimono into her back, she begins a journey that sees her family and Konrad's eternally linked in a cycle of love, betrayal, misunderstanding and finally, atonement, which lasts for 65 years.
‘Any reader anticipating a predictable yarn about the radicalization of Islamist youth may feel cheated. Far more, I suspect, will feel challenged and enlightened, possibly provoked, and undoubtedly enriched.'
Maya Jaggi in The Guardian
Kamila Shamsie was born in 1973 in Pakistan. Her first novel, In the City by the Sea, was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Her second novel, Salt and Saffron, was included in the Orange Prize list of ‘21 Writers for the 21st Century'. In 1999 she received the Prime Minister's Award for Literature in Pakistan. She has a BA in Creative Writing from Hamilton College in Clinton New York, where she has also taught Creative Writing, and a MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She writes for The Guardian, New Statesman, Index on Censorship and Prospect, and broadcasts on radio. Burnt Shadows (Bloomsbury, 2009) is her latest book. She lives in London and Karachi.
Each month International PEN's Book Club will feature a book selected from those presented at International PEN's Literary Festivals around the world. For more information please check the Literary Events section of this website. The festivals celebrate writing around the globe, and International PEN hopes to encourage reading across borders. In April, Kamila participated in this year's Free the Word! festival in London. She has provided reader's notes exclusively for the Free the Word! World Book Club which explore both the political and historical context of Burnt Shadows as well as offering a personal insight into the story.
Here are some potential areas for conversation and discussion of Burnt Shadows below:
Hiroko's love of languages enables her to belong everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. How much is Burnt Shadows about one woman's journey to assimilate with the culture of the country she lives in? Is she successful in this?
Burnt Shadows has been described as an ‘epic' by many critics and Shamsie's work often reflects on troubled recent histories through the prism of individual lives and losses. Is this an effective way to educate the reader, to draw us into histories that we may have thought we know about and looking at them from the view of a three-dimensional character?
The novel starts at the end, with a prisoner in an orange jumpsuit asking: How did it come to this? Was this an effective literary tool? Did it work for you as a reader?
We would like to hear your views about the Free the Word! Book Club book each month. Please do share your discussions with us at http://freetheblog.typepad.com/
