Start with Home Fire. It takes the plot of Antigone — a sister who will not leave her brother's body unburied, against a state that has forbidden it — and relocates it to a British Pakistani family, a young man who has gone to Syria, and a Home Secretary with a great deal to lose. It won the Women's Prize for Fiction, it is the most tightly constructed thing Shamsie has written, and its five-part structure hands each section to a different character so that you are never allowed to settle into one person's version of right.
The obvious alternative is to begin at the beginning, and here that is a mistake worth avoiding. Shamsie's early Karachi novels are good and they are noticeably the work of a younger writer; the compression and the structural nerve that make Home Fire land took twenty years to arrive. Read the strongest book first, then go back — none of the novels are connected, so nothing is spoiled.
The two big historical novels
Burnt shadows is the one to read second, and it is the widest thing she has attempted: it opens in Nagasaki in August 1945 and moves through partition-era Delhi, Karachi under Zia, Afghanistan during the Soviet war and New York after 2001, following one woman and the two families she becomes attached to. It is a book about how the same violence keeps arriving in new uniforms. Some readers find the final American section the least convincing part; it is still the novel that established her range.
A God in Every Stone goes to Peshawar in 1914 and the years around the 1930 Qissa Khwani bazaar massacre, braiding an English archaeologist, an Indian soldier in the British army and a young Pashtun into a story about excavation in both senses. It is quieter and more patient than Burnt shadows, and it is the book to read if the historical sweep is what drew you rather than the family drama.
The early Karachi novels
These three are best read as a group, in publication order, once you know you like her.
Salt and Saffron is the lightest — a young woman returning from America to an aristocratic Karachi family and the not-quite-buried scandal of a relative who ran off with a cook. It is charming and slight, and it is the easiest of the six to finish in a sitting.
Kartography is the strongest of the early work: two friends growing up in a Karachi torn by ethnic violence in the 1980s and 90s, and the discovery of what their parents did during the 1971 war. If you read only one pre-2009 Shamsie, read this.
Broken Verses turns on a missing dissident poet, a mother who vanished, and coded letters arriving years later. It is her most explicitly political early book and the most uneven.
The most recent
Best of Friends follows two Karachi schoolgirls into adult life in London, where one runs a tech company and the other a civil liberties organisation, and the childhood loyalty between them collides with what they have each become. Its two halves are very differently paced — a compressed Karachi adolescence, then a long contemporary London section — and readers who loved the first half sometimes cool on the second. Read it last.
Where to stop
Two books will give you the writer: Home Fire for structure and moral pressure, Burnt shadows for scope. If you want a third, make it Kartography, which is where the preoccupations of the later novels first show up in raw form.
Her 1998 debut, In the City by the Sea, is not in our catalogue. It is a first novel and it reads like one, so its absence costs you little unless you are completist. Find more world-literature reading paths on Discover.
Follow the full ordered path here: Kamila Shamsie Reading Order: Where to Start with Her Novels.
