Sonia Nair and Kamila Shamsie at the Wheeler Centre

With her seventh novel, Home Fire, Pakistani-British author Kamila Shamsie has pulled off an improbable feat.

Home Fire is a work of great ambition (it's a rigorously researched story of global terrorism, drawing its structure from Sophocles' Antigone) and it's also a gripping page-turner. It's a stinging, and often funny, indictment on our facile political debates about terror, security and religious extremism. And it calls on us to recognise the humanity of both the powerless and the powerful in its story of citizenship and conflicting loyalties. The book's cast of characters includes an Islamic State media recruit, his twin sister and a British Home Secretary.

Home Fire won the 2018 Women's Prize for Literature in the UK and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Shamsie has twice won the prestigious Patras Bokhari Award in Pakistan for previous novels. Her body of work is characterised by in-depth research, and a preoccupation with the ways in which political events impact on individual identities and family ties.

In conversation with Sonia Nair at the Wheeler Centre, the ingenious Shamsie talks global faultlines and torn loyalties.

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