Kamila Shamsie (Writers and Their Work)

In the first book-length study of this major contemporary author, Peter Morey traces the influence of Kamila Shamsie’s formative years, spent under a military dictatorship in 1980s Karachi, on writing with an acute sense of social justice and an awareness of the inescapable influence of the past on the present. Working through her novels from 1998’s In the City by the Sea to Best of Friends (2022), via her best-known work, Home Fire (2017), Morey traces Shamsie’s preoccupation with questions of home and belonging, childhood friendship and its loss, the position of women in patriarchal societies, and the precariousness of citizenship for minorities and migrants in a modern era of populist nationalism fed by revenant forms of imperial nostalgia and racism. Shamsie emerges as a writer firmly rooted in the upheavals of her homeland but who, through political commitment and personal experience of migration, is uniquely positioned to comment on the tenuousness of ideas of home and who, as a result, renounces the false consolations of nationalism, instead endorsing a transnational vision which is worked out in novels of expanding social range and increasing formal sophistication. Read more