Watch this author video to hear Kamila Shamsie discuss her novel Burnt Shadows, which was a finalist for the Orange Prize. In this author interview, Shamsie talks about the idea that sparked the book, and how she wanted to explore the way history and personal lives intersect.

Part historical fiction book, part contemporary novel, Burnt Shadows takes us from the bombing of Nagasaki in 1945 to New York in 2002. Hiroko Tanaka is twenty one and in love with the man she is to marry, Konrad Weiss. Stepping out onto her veranda, wrapped in a kimono with three black cranes swooping across the back, her world is suddenly and irrevocably altered. In the numbing aftermath of the atomic bomb that obliterates everything she has known, all that remains are the bird-shaped burns on her back, an indelible reminder of the world she has lost.

In search of new beginnings, two years later, Hiroko travels to Delhi. It is there that her life will become intertwined with that of Konrad's half sister Elizabeth, her husband, James Burton, and their employee Sajjad Ashraf, from whom she starts to learn Urdu.

With the partition of India, and the creation of Pakistan, Hiroko will find herself displaced once again, in a world where old wars are replaced by new conflicts. But the shadows of history—personal and political—are cast over the interrelated worlds of the Burtons, the Ashrafs, and the Tanakas as they are transported from Pakistan to New York and, in the novel's astonishing climax, to Afghanistan in the immediate wake of 9/11. The ties that have bound these families together over decades and generations are tested to the extreme, with unforeseeable consequences.

Sweeping in its scope and mesmerizing in its evocation of time and place, Burnt Shadows is a novel for our time by a writer of extraordinary grace and vision.

"Kamila Shamsie is a writer of immense ambition and strength." -- Salman Rushdie

Learn more about the book Burnt Shadows at http://us.macmillan.com/burntshadows

Read more about author Kamila Shamsie at http://us.macmillan.com/author/kamilashamsie