Kamila Shamsie: Home Fire | Adapting Antigone and Googling While Muslim

We sat down with Kamila Shamsie — author of Burnt Shadows and A God in Every Stone — to talk about her latest novel, Home Fire.

Spanning London, Massachusetts, Karachi and Raqqa, the Man Booker-longlisted Home Fire follows the lives of five main characters who each identify in some way as British Muslim: Isma, Aneeka, and their brother, Parvaiz, living under the shadow of their father's jihadist past, and the handsome Eamonn and his father, the British Home Secretary. As Parvaiz begins to follow in his father's footsteps, the two families intertwine in ways that will change them forever.

Told in five sections, with five protagonists, whose perspectives overlap and inform one another, Home Fire originated with Shamsie's plans to adapt the Ancient Greek tragedy Antigone. Here the author talks about the process of reimagining Sophocles' classic play (and when to stop being influenced by a source) as well as how her own experience fed into the book — not least that of GWM: Googling While Muslim.

For more about the book and to buy, visit http://www.foyles.co.uk/witem/fiction...

To read our written interview with the author, visit http://www.foyles.co.uk/author-kamila...