Book: Home Fire
Autor: Kamila Shamsie
Country: Pakistan 🇵🇰
Format: Audio
Narrator: Tania Rodrigues
Length: 8 hours
Publication: 2017
Let me just start by saying that this book has one of the best endings I’ve ever seen. Five minutes after finishing the audiobook I was still glued to my stationary bike at the gym. Two hours later, I was still digesting it.
Home Fire is certainly a slow burn that works its way up until a fever pitch of an explosion.
The story is divided into 5 parts, each one centring around one of the characters. There are two British Pakistani families. On one side there is Isma, the older sister who had to care for her younger siblings after their mother died, and the twins Parvaiz and Aneeka who are now 19. On the other side, there’s Eamonn, the son of the new Secretary of State of the UK, and their parents.
“She was the portrait to his father’s Dorian Gray – all the anxiety you’d expect him to feel was manifest in her.”
Home Fire
The book starts with Isma at Heathrow Airport, being detained for interrogation while she is moving to the U.S. to pursue her studies. After some time in Amherst, Massachusetts, she meets Eamonn, and things get complicated when she realizes who he is. That’s because Isma has a complicated family. Her absent father left home to fight in the Jihad in several countries, and her brother has just left for Syria, to follow a similar destiny.
This first part of the book was very slow for me and could have been shorter. I confess I was often distracted by the slow pace of things, but I’m glad I stuck around. In the second part, we follow Aneeka, and that’s when things start to heat up because she’s completely different from her sister. Destiny pushes Eamonn and Aneeka together, which only makes things even more complicated.
“All the wrong choices he made, they were necessary to get him to the right place, the place he is now.”
Home Fire
I loved Aneeka’s character and how mesmerizing she is. She is also deeply connected with her twin brother and will do everything in her power to get him back. Meanwhile, Eamonn has to navigate the complex relationship with his father, Karamat Lone, a career politician who seems to have turned his back on his Pakistani background in order to ascend politically.
Shamsie writes beautifully. Her description of grief is so strong and light at the same time, that it’s one of those things that I will carry with me for a long time. It makes sense that she won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2018 for this book and was longlisted for the Booker Prize.
“Grief manifested itself in ways that felt like anything but grief; grief obliterated all feelings but grief; (…) grief was bad-tempered, grief was kind; grief saw nothing but itself, grief saw every speck of pain in the world; grief spread its wings large like an eagle, grief huddled small like a porcupine; grief needed company, grief craved solitude; grief wanted to remember, wanted to forget;”
Home Fire
Her writing style breathes air into this very heavy story. There are descriptions of torture that you might want to skip. She also brings to life all the complexity of living as a Muslim in the UK in the post-9/11 world. There’s constant paranoia, a feeling of being watched all the time and even the fear of googling the wrong thing and looking like a terrorist, especially if your father was a jihadist and your brother left to join the fight in Syria.
But there’s also the other side of what Parvaiz encounters when he gets to Syria, and all the manipulation he sees himself pulled into. What looks like a just cause and just media work turns into a nightmare. The author did a lot of research on the topic and learned about the recruitment process done by terrorist groups operating in Syria, and how they use sophisticated mediatic tools to both seduce new recruits and terrify enemies.
“For girls, becoming women was inevitability. For boys, becoming men was ambition.”
Home Fire
As a journalist working for the International desk of a newspaper, I unfortunately had an encounter with some of those videos, at the time made by ISIS. It’s something that I will never forget and I don’t recommend anyone watching it.
A lot of the book is centred around how these different characters are just small pieces in a bigger game, but instead of making the bigger players the villains, she also humanizes them, by giving us access to their inner monologue, anxieties, desires and fears.
This book was really close to a 5-stars for me if it wasn’t the slow beginning. Nevertheless, is an excellent read, especially if you want to understand the many sides of terrorism and xenophobia in Europe.
Read more about Arab authors and stories:
– Weekly Opening Lines – first lines of Home Fire
– Knife Review – Meditations After an Attempted Murder
– Book Review: Salt Houses – a Story About Palestinian Diaspora
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