YOU Reading Group: Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie

Home Fire is published by Bloomsbury, price £8.99. To order a copy for the special price of £6.74 until 13 May, click here or call 0844 571 0640; free p&p on orders over £15

THE STORY

Privileged rich boy meets beautiful girl from the other side of the tracks and falls in love. There is a suspicion that she might have an ulterior motive, especially as she insists on keeping their relationship secret. The boy’s father is furious when he finds out and bans his son from contacting her again. Sounds like a familiar story, but it takes on a new dimension in this powerful novel, which sets the personal against the political and confronts the competing demands of love and loyalty.

A new home for the old story of the small girl who takes it upon herself to speak truth to power… a contemporary classic

The boy, Eamonn, is the mixed-race son of Karamat Lone, a Muslim politician newly promoted to Home Secretary. The girl, Aneeka, is the twin sister of Parvaiz, who has been radicalised to join Isis in Syria. Parvaiz quickly becomes disillusioned and his sister will do anything she can to help bring him back home. But Karamat, who believes that people like Parvaiz should automatically forfeit their British citizenship, will do anything to prevent his return. The story – engrossing, tense, tragic – provides a thought-provoking perspective on the fragile world we live in.

THE TASTER

‘Over the next few days he discovered her version of secrecy meant he didn’t have her phone number, couldn’t contact her online, wasn’t permitted to know when she was planning to come and go. She’d simply turn up at some point in the day, sometimes staying for so short a time they never even got completely undressed, other times remaining with him overnight. “Secrecy” was an aphrodisiac that gained potency the longer it continued, every moment filled with the possibility that she might appear…’

THE QUESTIONS

1. Does the novel change your understanding of the Muslim community in Britain?

2. Should loyalty to family always be stronger than loyalty to country? And is love stronger than either?

3. Who takes the right path, Aneeka or her sister Isma?

4. Is Aneeka simply using Eamonn or does she have genuine feelings for him?

5. What do you think of the decision by Parvaiz to fight for Isis? Is the novel too sympathetic to him?

6. Is Karamat Lone right in trying to prevent Parvaiz from returning to the UK? What if he had harmed one of your relatives?

7. What divides Eamonn’s and Aneeka’s families, and what do they have in common?

8. Where does Karamat Lone’s greatest loyalty lie?

9. What do you make of the novel’s title, Home Fire?

10. What do you think of the ending? What does it reveal about Aneeka and Eamonn’s relationship?

THE AUTHOR

Author Kamila Shamsie

Kamila Shamsie is the author of seven novels, including Burnt Shadows, a previous YOU Reading Group choice, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction.

She was born in Karachi, Pakistan, in 1973, and grew up with her mother’s typewriter providing the soundtrack to her life as she wrote newspaper features on a variety of subjects, though her primary interest was in books and writers. Her great-aunt Attia Hosain was also a writer of fiction, so perhaps it wasn’t entirely surprising that, at the age of 11, Kamila started to work on her first ‘novel’ with her best friend. It was called A Dog’s Life, and After, and set in dog heaven.

At 18 she went to university in America, studying creative writing with the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali, followed by an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in creative writing at the University of Massachusetts. The novel she wrote for her MFA thesis was accepted for publication before she completed the course, which, she confesses, means she has absolutely no stories about the suffering she had to endure in the years when her novels were being rejected, or the strange jobs she held down to fund her writing.

That first novel, In the City By the Sea, was published in 1998 and for nearly a decade afterwards Kamila led what she calls a somewhat nomadic life; she would write in Karachi for a few months of the year, teach creative writing in America at her old college, and in between come to London for a few months every year, partly because it was useful to be in the country where her books were being published, but mostly because she loved London.

In 2007 she moved to the city on a visa for ‘writers, artists and composers’ and, after a fairly protracted process, eventually became a British citizen. In 2013 she was on Granta’s list of Best of Young British Novelists, even though she was a few months away from her British citizenship at the time. A God in Every Stone, published in 2014, was shortlisted for the Baileys Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, and Home Fire was long-listed for the Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and long-listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Kamila Shamsie writes…

In 2014, Jatinder Verma, the artistic director of Tara Arts in South London, sent me an email asking if we could meet – and when we did he said he’d liked my novels and wanted me to write a play for his theatre. I pointed out that I had no idea how to write a play, so he suggested that I adapt an existing play.

‘The Ancient Greeks are speaking loudly to us these days,’ he said. ‘Why not something like Antigone?’ I was in between novels, in need of something to occupy my mind, and I’ve always loved the theatre, so of course I said I’d think about it.

At this point I didn’t actually remember anything about Antigone, other than the fact that I’d read it at university. So, as soon as I left that meeting, I went to Wikipedia to look up the plot summary. And there I read of two sisters with differing views on how to respond to the king’s decree that their traitorous brother, who has just died, must not be given a burial but should be left above the ground as food for birds and dogs.

As I remember it – and of course this memory must be flawed – I knew almost immediately that the story I wanted to tell was set in a British Muslim family, with two sisters at odds about how to respond to the government’s treatment of their treasonous brother. Of course, I knew I couldn’t completely transpose into modern Britain Sophocles’ storyline of a king declaring that a body must be left unburied – but that was what made me think I really could write the story as a contemporary novel.

What I mean is this: when you rewrite an old story you need to find ways for it to work for people who don’t know the original (ie, it can’t lean so heavily on the original that it doesn’t make sense or carry weight for those who don’t know it) and you also have to find ways for it to work for people who do know the original (ie, it mustn’t instantly feel over-familiar and predictable.)

The fact that many things in the play would have to change – including that central question of the ‘unburial’ rule – is what intrigued me about trying to re-write it. How do you make something old new, while still carrying the old story within the bones of the new one? It was a while before I realised that the question that I was asking myself – and therefore my readers – was: to what extent are the vexing questions of our contemporary age not really as ‘new’ or unprecedented as we might think?

I’m often struck by the fact that with certain kinds of crimes we try to understand motivation, and with others we simply declare that the perpetrators are ‘monsters’ or ‘come from a different world’. The ancient stories remind us that characters living 2000 years ago can be familiar and explicable to us, even when committing the most extreme acts – so how can we possibly look at anyone who lives in the same city or nation as us and say that’s inexplicable?

I wanted to look at a story that was very much in the news – young Britons, often teenagers, going to join a barbaric regime – and understand it at the human level, via the prism of a 2,000-year-old story of family and grief and love. It wasn’t only the ‘why do they do it?’ question that I was interested in, but ‘what does it mean for the families?’ and also ‘what does the tone and manner of the government’s response mean for this nation?’ All these questions became more rather than less complicated the further I went into writing the novel as characters became more and more real to me.

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