"Home Fire" by Kamila Shamsie

    Kamila Shamsie’s “Home Fire” is one of the more powerful narratives I’ve read in recent years, and its characters and images will linger with you long after putting it down. The novel was long-listed for this year’s Man Booker Prize and certainly deserves that honor for its gorgeous, emotive prose, as well its imaginative retelling of an ancient Greek tale. Though there some great modern adaptations of the epics and tragedies (in Margaret Atwood’s “The Penelopiad,” Madeline Miller’s “Song of Achilles” and Lauren Groff’s “Fates and Furies”) Shamsie finds a perfect correlation for “Antigone” in the tensions of our current era, between Islam and the West and in the crisis between variants of Islam. It feels as though Sophocles could be writing the story of our modern world.

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