March 2024: Reading Kamila Shamsie's novel Home Fire 🌷
Plus, info on Jersey Shore writing retreat and new online book group.
Dear Writers,
I just finished a novel I loved, a book I had no intention of reading and had never heard of until it showed up on the list of books to be read and discussed by my local college alumnae book club. The book, Home Fire, is the seventh novel by Kamila Shamsie. It was published in 2017, won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2018, and was long listed for the Man Booker Prize. I have no idea what I was doing in 2017 but I missed it. The author comes from a long line of women writers: Her mother is Pakistani literary critic, Muneeza Shamsie, and her great-aunt was Attia Hosain, who wrote about vanishing Muslim culture in India. In 2019, Shamsie was scheduled to receive the Nelly Sachs prize, named for the German-Jewish Nobel laureate, but the prize was withdrawn because of the author’s support of BDS. I am Jewish and love Israel (though conflicted about the current conflict) and there were reasons for me not to want to read this novel but I try to separate the artist from the art so I did.
The book discussion took place in an alum’s apartment. Before we started, everyone went around the living room and shared their first name and graduation year. One woman, class of ‘63, said she hadn’t read the book but was there because her husband had died the previous Thursday and she wanted to be with people (we met on a Wednesday.) Another woman, class of ‘55, leaned in to console her. The host thanked her for coming and quoted something her rabbi had discussed the past week. “Community, community, community!” the host said. “That’s why we’re here.”
Not everyone loved Home Fire and some people actively disliked it, but we had a civil, thoughtful discussion that ran almost 90 minutes.
I am so grateful for this book group. Twelve books are chosen every fall for the coming year and discussions are scheduled a year in advance. You have to have attended all the previous 12 book meetings in order to be part of the committee that chooses the 12 new books. (I never attend all 12 meetings so I never get to choose the books.) Once the books are chosen, I scroll down the list and see if I can make the meetings and/or want to read the book. I have missed meetings of books I’ve loved (Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Delia Ephron’s Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life) and attended discussions of books I wouldn’t have read on my own (Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies). I am not close to anyone in this group. I don’t know most of their last names, where they live, or what they do. We all went to the same college sometime in the past 70 years but what truly connects us is a desire to read and discuss books.
Like Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, Home Fire is the story of a family under siege, and the secrets they keep. The story is told from five points of view: Isma, Aneeka, and Parvaiz Pasha, three British Pakistani siblings, plus the points of view of Karamat Lone, a British politician who built his career by rejecting his Muslim background, and his son, Eamonn, who becomes involved with the two Pasha sisters. The Pasha siblings are orphaned young adults; their father was a jihadi terrorist captured in Afghanistan who died on his way to Guantanamo; their mother has passed away. (Like so many great stories—including Bambi and Anna Quindlen’s new novel, After Annie—a beloved mother dies.) The book begins as Isma is detained at Heathrow while trying to fly to Boston to begin graduate work at Amherst (where Shamsie studied.) The story plays out in Amherst, London, Istanbul, Karachi, and Syria, where Parvaiz, a sound engineer, joins ISIS. I had no interest in reading from the point of view of a terrorist, but the scenes where Parvaiz is recruited/seduced/persuaded to become a terrorist are instructive, gripping and unnerving.
The novel is loosely based on Sophocles’ play Antigone. If you know the ending to Antigone, you may anticipate the ending of Home Fire, and yet it a credit to Shamsie’s writing that the ending of Home Fire manages to be shocking.
Some people at the book discussion objected to how the Home Fire characters behaved and the choices they made. I don’t care so much about whether characters do the “right” thing or not, since generally in storytelling, the bigger the mistakes a character makes and the greater the risks they take, the more interesting the story becomes. What I care about is:
How well-written was the book? More specifically, was the story so absorbing that as the reader, we forgot where we were when we were reading it and stopped doing everything else so we could finish it?
Did the characters feel “real?” Did we feel that we understood them intimately? Could we imagine what it was like to live these characters’ lives, navigate the challenges they faced, even if in our own lives, we would have done the opposite?
Could we see what the characters saw, smelled and tasted? If they were having sex or eating something delicious, did we feel that we were doing it with them?
Did we feel moved by the events in the book?
Did the book offer a turn/pivot/surprise?
Did the book educate us in some way?
Did the ending blow us away?
I ended up reading Home Fire on my phone in the back of the car while my husband drove us home from my in-laws, and listening to it while I ran in Central Park. I am still thinking about its brutal, cinematic ending, even though I finished it a week ago. You can read a recent interview with Shamsie here and a clip of an interview with her here.
In an interview with The Jakarta Post, Shamsie described her writing process:
''When I read the play—which has at its center two sisters who respond differently to the legal repercussions of their brother's act of treason—I knew immediately that I wanted to connect it to a story that was very much in the news at the time, that of young British Muslims and their relationship with the British state...When you write a novel you don't think about subjects as being sensitive or not—you just think of them as being interesting and complex, and you wonder how to tell them in a story that's about a group of characters.''
I don’t know if people reading the same books together will bring peace on earth, but who knows? Maybe it could. All of this leads me to this question: Would you like to join a bimonthly online book group in which we discuss craft and focus on how a book is structured, and try to figure out how and why a book works? If so, click here.
About: Join us for a 4-day, 3-night writing retreat, Monday, June 24 through Thursday, June 27. Writers will stay at Daddy O’s in Brant Beach. We’ll meet for 3-hour workshops in the mornings, and spend afternoons writing, sunbathing, paddle-boarding, kayaking, bike riding, getting massages, and walking the jetties in Barnegat Light. We’ll eat lunch and dinner together. Writers can submit up to 40 pages (10,000 words) for line edits, written feedback & discussion. Submissions due June 1.
Cost: $1,800, includes three writing workshops, three lunches, three dinners and beach and bay access.
Exclusions: Hotel room, alcohol, massages, and rental bikes.
Booking: Please book your room directly with Daddy O’s using the code ZINFRO. We have a block of standard queen rooms, priced at $425/night. Daddy O’s is a fun place to stay and offers free “grab n go” breakfast. Check our website for hotel alternatives.
You can also pay us directly on Venmo or Zelle.
You asked for an intensive writing workshop—here it is. This workshop focuses on writing new material and receiving feedback on it over a short period of time. Writers can submit ten pages (double spaced, 12-14 point font, 2,500 words) for line edits and feedback before each class. You’ll leave each session fired up, new work in hand.
This workshop is designed for beginning to intermediate writers. The emphasis is on writing and revising your own work as well as mastering the principles of storytelling. Every week, we will discuss an assigned reading, do writing exercises (they will stimulate your writing, we promise!) and discuss writers’ submissions in a supportive and productive workshop setting. Writers can submit up to 40 pages of work over the course of ten sessions.
This 10-session workshop is for committed writers looking for line edits and comprehensive written and oral feedback on their work in a supportive community. Writers can submit up to 40 pages for discussion over the course of ten weeks. Revisions are encouraged. Readings and writing prompts will be assigned for every class. We will discuss short stories, essays, and portions of novels and memoirs with the goal of seeing how these pieces are structured and why they work. The writing prompts are designed to crack open, sharpen and expand your stories.
Fiona McFarlane, Hostel (The New Yorker)
Pegah Ouji , Is It Too Late? (Isele Magazine)
Jodi Rudoren, Why I made cookies for Purim despite — actually, because of — the war (The Forward)