In Nagasaki, Hiroko Tanaka is a munitions worker living in Japan during the end of World War II. Her love for the German Konrad Weiss is brought to an expeditious end when an atomic bomb is dropped on the city. The tragic event leads Hiroko to seek refuge in Delhi, India, where she stays with Konrad's half-sister, Elizabeth. She falls in love with Sajjad Ashraf, who is teaching her the South-Asian language of Urdu. These are great, familiar stories, retranslated and adapted again and again. They’re some of the most famous texts in western literature. And epic has historically been a very top-down genre: nationalistic (the Aeneid), featuring heroes whose valour and virtue are validated by their high birth (King Arthur, Beowulf, even Aragorn in Lord of the Rings). I am fascinated by the nation-building aspect of epic, not to mention its masculine, martial traditions; it is something in which I, a woman of mixed cultural heritage, felt I had no place.

Another Burnt Shadows Theme is of Feminism that has been portrayed in the novel. Shamsie has shown three major women characters of Burnt Shadows including Hiroko Tanaka, Elizabeth Burton, and Kim Burton.

The secrets kept inside this book are damaging, whereas a writer aims for their work, with which they have an intimate relationship for a while, to ultimately come out in print. And certain kinds of secrets, like those of my character Parvaiz, are a lie and that is another difference. When I finish a draft I might show it to someone. I talked to the writer Gillian Slovo, who the book is dedicated to, this time because she was writing a play, [ Another World, with Nicolas Kent for the National Theatre] about the same thing. Batting ideas around was enormously helpful. Powerful family bonds are central to Home Fire. Do you regard blood as the strongest link between people?

No, you haven’t.’ He lifted a hand into the space between them. ‘And I’ve never seen you in yours.’ On the morning of August 9, Hiroko and Konrad are in separate parts of the city when they hear an air raid siren. Konrad takes cover in a shelter on the property he is living in, Azalea Manor, where his one-time friend, Yoshi Wanatabe, joins him. (Yoshi no longer associates with Konrad in public because of the German's unfavorable political status, though he had promised Konrad that as soon as the war was over, their friendship would resume as normal). Part 1 of Burnt Shadows Summary begins on August 9, 1945, in Nagasaki, Japan. The exposition starts when the protagonist, a former school teacher, Hiroko Tanaka, and German translator Konrad Weiss fall in love. Hroko is found a firm believer of feminism .she never accepts social & sexual indifferences neither for herself nor for others.Shamise’s heroine is very much realistic ho never turns her face away from the realities of her life .She faces them all alone with a huge belief on herself .She never consider herself as helpless, always remains active, bold and ties to find mental peace and keeps on struggling to build her own identity. Without any doubt Shamsie has painted all the colures and feminist traits in her character. Her character seems very much inspiring for other girls of her time own today’s time as well to follow & copy the level of her boldness and intensity of her will power.In the same way at many places the traces of feminism can be found. Chapter -5 CONCLUSION

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Burnt Shadows raises and explores a vast array of topical and controversial issues. As the characters struggle to understand national identity, religion and politics, and the impact these issues have on their own lives, the novel attempts to answer its opening question. Inevitably, an ambitious and far-ranging work such as this raises questions more than answers, but Shamsie has been highly acclaimed for this epic novel and its attempt to bring together world events from Nagasaki to Guantanamo, while depicting the personal stories of two cross-cultural families whose pains and losses bring to life the real human suffering behind war and politics. This novel, published in 1972, is an attempt to reimagine (perhaps explode) the epic for a new era of human civilisation, from a Marxist perspective. Set in Europe in the years immediately before the outbreak of the first world war, it follows the sexual exploits of a modern Don Juan (the subject of Byron’s sexual epic). “Never again will a single story be told as if it is the only one,” the book says, expanding the idea of the epic: it does away with the idea that single texts can speak for a nation or a people as a whole. Such thinking made a huge impact on 20th-century literature in the emerging notion of the “postcolonial”: it’s the guiding thought behind Salman Rushdie’s maximalist epic novel Midnight’s Children, for instance. For example Hiroko, she became Hiroko Ashraf from Hiroko Tanaka, and she had to face identity crisis during her life in Pakistan. As Raza said,

A person's shadow on bank steps in Hiroshima, Japan, which was created during the 1945 nuclear blast. (Image credit: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) Fat Man and Little Boy Different types of images have been in the novel. “ There are feelings, then no feelings, skin and something else”. In this quote, the word “feelings” is an example of tactile imagery. War and displacement are also Burnt Shadows Themes. This displacement has become more traumatic when linked with the extensive human tragedy of the dropping of an atomic bomb in World War. Also, it was the language barrier who brought Hiroko close to both Konrad and Sajjad. Motifs in Burnt Shadows Violence and War 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 RushdieThe gamma radiation released by the atomic bombs also traveled as thermal energy that could reach 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,538 degrees Celsius), Real Clear Science reported. When the energy hit an object, like a bicycle or a person, the energy was absorbed, shielding objects in the path and creating a bleaching effect outside the shadow. In the Prologue, an unknown man is imprisoned and knows that he will be soon forced to wear an orange jumpsuit.

But the bitter memory of her personal and tragedical loss always remains with her. She expresses her feelings with her friend Elizabeth in this way as she says: In this way, the wartime atmosphere in "The Yet Unknowing World" brings to light a major conflict throughout the entirety of Burnt Shadows: that of the individual vs the nation-state. As Shamsie's characters move through the world, they find individual bonds with other people that might come into conflict with the way that their national identities relate to each other. In other words, Shamsie's characters move through the world as both individuals and as citizens. It is how they choose to navigate these different understandings of self that is important. Shamsie lays out this theme in an interview: "From the beginning [Hiroko] was, in my mind, a multilingual woman, in love with a German man and disdainful of official attitudes towards foreigners—but she was living in a highly xenophobic society and later experienced the most unspeakable act of war by one nation against the people of another nation. So these two divergent currents—her own open nature and the us versus them nature of wartime nation-states—were established early on, through Hiroko, as being important to the novel." Yet despite the underlying political commentary in her books, ultimately Shamsie’s protagonists are humans caught up in larger dramas, and the purpose of her books is to be, in the author’s words, “novels which look at what it means to live individual lives entwined with history — how to reconcile the awfulness of the world with the joy of it; how to love, how to be loyal.” She starts living with Konrad’s half-sister. She changes her name to hide her German Identity and adopts a new identity with her husband James Burton that shows the Identity Crisis in Burnt Shadows.Her tone expresses her deep love for her mother land .Her love for her country seems increasing with time She seems gloomy deep inside but still she never thinks to give up, Despite of those unforgettable bitter past memories but yet she believes on moving ahead. When she moves to America in later years of her life she remains eager to learn English language and maintains her spirit of learning new things with new morning. The radicalisation of British Muslims is a major theme not just of news reports, but in drama, too, with Peter Kosminsky’s The State on Channel 4 last week. Is it in danger of becoming the go-to plot for modern thriller writers? Burnt signifies pain in the novel which is consistent throughout with every Burnt Shadows Characters either physically or psychologically.