What happens to those left behind when men go off to fight? This electrifying novel is Pakistan-raised, London-based Kamila Shamsie's seventh. In her acknowledgements, she says she was inspired by Sophocles' story of Antigone, the young woman who defies the king's order that her brother remain unburied on the field of battle.
However, this story of the Pasha and Lone families in contemporary London, Syria, Pakistan and the US also has more than a touch of Romeo and Juliet.The power of family ties infuses the novel – family versus career, versus self-preservation, versus politics, versus jihad.
Home Fire, which was longlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize, opens with Isma Pasha being interrogated at London's Heathrow Airport as she prepares to board a plane to the US, where she will undertake her PhD – studies interrupted by the deaths of her mother and grandmother that forced her to become a surrogate parent to her younger brother and sister, 12-year-old twins Pavaiz and Aneeka.
Now the twins are 19, old enough to fend for themselves. But first she must endure hours of intrusive questions from officials that range from "Do you consider yourself British?" (she was born and raised in London) to her views on the division of Iraq, suicide bombers, and The Great British Bake Off.
We soon learn that this interrogation is not simply because she is a Muslim, but because of the past actions of her father, and the more recent choices of her brother Pavaiz.
Her father died while being taken to Guantanamo. We are not told what drove Abil Pasha towards jihadism; Isma sees it as simply one of a succession of enterprises to which he turned his hand: "guitarist, salesman, gambler, con man, jihadist– but he was most consistent in the role of absentee father".
The consequences for the family were not just the loss of a husband and father, but the attention of the police. On one occasion, the police take away a photograph album Abil Pasha has sent to Pavaiz with the inscription: "When you're old enough, my son." When it is eventually returned to the boy, the pictures of his father with his jihadist comrades have been removed.
Pavaiz is blessed with acute hearing and dreams of being a sound engineer. Aneeka feels the connection with her twin acutely, but now she is studying law she spends more and more time away from home. Pavaiz sees the break-up of their household as a kind of betrayal, a decision that has been made without him. So when Farooq appears, a man of "instant glamour" who speaks of his father as a hero who "understood that a man has larger responsibilities than the ones his wife and mother want to chain him to", Pavaiz is ready to listen.
Entwined with this story of the Pasha siblings is the story of the Lone family. The Pashas regard controversial MP Karamat Lone with contempt for failing to help them find answers when Abil Pasha died, but now Karamat has been made the country's first Muslim Home Secretary. His son Eamonn, a drifter living on his mother's money, falls hard for the beautiful Aneeka.
From this moment the fates of the two families become bound together in an inevitable trajectory towards tragedy.
Shamsie's last two novels have looped back and forth through history – from Nagasaki in 1941 to the US in 2002 in Burnt Shadows(shortlisted for the Orange Prize) and from Turkey in 515BC to Pakistan in 1930 in A God in Every Stone.
In contrast, Home Fires is compressed into a matter of months. Shamsie reveals the intimate – and conflicting – worlds of each of her five protagonists with enormous skill. The effect is more immediate and heartbreaking than any headline, and shows with devastating power how ordinary people can be caught up in the unthinkable.
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