Kamila Shamsie

What sparked Burnt Shadows?
I had been toying with the idea of writing a noel that started with the bombing of Nagasaki – a historical event I'd been interested in for some years. But the moment at which the novel really took shape as a novel rather than as an idea that might or might not become a novel was when I was reading John Hersey's Hiroshima, which had this line about the effect of the atom bomb: On some undressed bodies the burns had made patterns - of undershirt straps and suspenders and, on the skin of some women (since white repelled the heat from the bomb and dark clothes absorbed it and conducted it to the skin) the shape of flowers they had had on their kimonos.' I read that line – and immediately there came to mind an image of a woman wearing a white kimono with three black cranes swooping across its back at the moment the bomb detonates – those cranes would then be burnt into her skin. I knew immediately that I had found the central character of the novel.

Please set the scene of the novel for us.
It's August 9, 1945 in Nagasaki and a young school-teacher, Hiroko Tanaka, and the German man she loves, Konrad Weiss, have both chosen to ignore the safety of bomb shelters, even though air-raid sirens are calling out across Nagasaki – instead they end up together in Hiroko's house. They imagine in future in which they'll leave Nagasaki together and travel the world – they'll go anywhere but Delhi, they decide, since Delhi is where Konrad's sister lives with her English husband, and Konrad wants nothing to do with them. As events unfold, Hiroko does end up in Delhi - and the novel follows the  entwined lives of her family and Konrad's family over sixty years and through five nations.

Do you have a particular attachment to any of the characters or places in the novel? If so, which one(s) and why?
Oh, all!  But if I have to single out one then my answer today (tomorrow it'll doubtless be different) is Elizabeth/Ilse, the half-German, half-English woman who we first meet as a rather sad colonial wife in Delhi in 1947 – she seems doomed to having a rather constrained and unhappy life and to making people around her unhappy. But she's able to quite dramatically alter her life, so that when we see her next over 50 years later she's a gloriously free-spirited and generous New Yorker; it would have been easy for her to simply wilt under the circumstances of her life, but instead when she's given – or gives herself – a second chance she seizes it with both hands and never loses sight of her own good fortune - I love that in her.

What are you reading at the moment?
Jayne Anne Phillips' Shelter.

What are you working on now?
I"m working on trying to get to work on another novel!