“Kamila Shamsie is a writer of immense ambition and strength. She understands a great deal about the ways in which the world’s many tragedies and histories shape one another, and about how human beings can try to avoid being crushed by their fate and can discover their humanity, even in the fiercest combat zones of the age. Burnt Shadows is an absorbing novel that commands, in the reader, a powerful emotional and intellectual response.”
— Salman Rushdie

“Burnt Shadows is audacious in its ambition, epic in its scope. A startling expansion of the author’s intentions, imagination and craftsmanship. One can only admire the huge advances she has made, and helped us to make, in understanding the new global tensions.”
— Anita Desai

“In this brilliant book Kamila Shamsie opens a vista onto the century we have just lived through — pointing out its terror and its solace. She is so extraordinary a writer that she also offers hints about the century we are living through — the dark corners that contain challenges, as well as the paths that lead to beauty’s lair.”
— Nadeem Aslam, author of Maps for Lost Lovers

“Burnt Shadows is a beautiful, beautiful book. I was entirely swept up in the story, and I feel, now that I’ve (so reluctantly) put it down, that I have traveled the world and spent the past six decades with Hiroko and her family. The book speaks boldly and powerfully of our age; I know it will stay with me for a long time to come.”
— Tahmima Anam, author of The Golden Age, which was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Costa, and won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for First Book