Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire brings Sophocles’ Antigone to present-day London, weaving a remarkably timely tale of two British Muslim families with differing ideas about bigotry, belief and loyalty.

With the proposed ban on Muslim travel and the most recent attacks in London, your novel could not be more timely. How do you think fiction can help us make sense of political crises?
I can’t say I’m finding much sense in today’s political crises myself, but one of fiction’s gifts—and discomforts—is its ability to put us in the perspectives of people from whose lives we usually feel very removed. But having said that, reading is about an exchange that occurs between the novel and the reader, so you need readers with a willingness to be placed within those perspectives.

Your books often have multiple narrative threads. Home Fire is no exception. What does that format offers you as a writer?
The answer to that probably lies in John Berger’s wonderful and oft-quoted line: Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.

What is your family like? You mother is also a writer, isn’t she?
She is, and so is my sister. You know how Tolstoy said all happy families are alike? If he’s right about that (and who am to argue with Tolstoy), then my family is like all other happy families.

What kind of research did you do for Home Fire?
Different kinds of research. There was the book kind: reading a number of different translations of Antigone, since the novel draws heavily on it. The wandering kind: going around areas of London in which parts of the book were set, and talking to people there or just taking in the physical details. The drawing on memory kind: Most of the Massachusetts section required nothing more than thinking back to my grad school days at UMass Amherst, and subsequent visits. The taking from someone else kind: When I was starting the novel, the writer Gillian Slovo was working on a verbatim play called Another World: How we lost our children to Islamic State, and she did copious research and let me have whichever bits of it I wanted. The will-this-get-me-into-trouble kind: There was quite a lot I had to find out about life in Raqqa under Islamic State, for which I spent a lot of time looking over my shoulder while online, hyper-conscious of our world of internet surveillance. That hyper-consciousness worked its way into the novel, so perhaps I can consider it a form of research.

You have lived in Pakistan, the U.S. and England. How have those different countries influenced your writing?
I really don’t know how to point to a particular country and say, x or y aspect of my writing comes from there, but perhaps my interest in multiple narratives comes from moving between places of overlapping histories that see those histories from such different perspectives.

Home Fire features all the current modes of social media communication, such as Skype, Twitter and, of course, email. What are some of the challenges of depicting our very up-to-the minute modern forms of communication?
Honestly? The biggest challenge was to get over my dislike of using brand names in my novels. It feels too much like product placement, and also feels as though it’s the part of the novel most likely to start seeming outdated well before any other part of it does.

Who are some of your favorite contemporary writers?
Ali Smith, Michael Ondaatje, Nadeem Aslam, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Tahmima Anam, Elena Ferrante, Hisham Matar, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson.

You have a very lyrical style. Do you write any poetry?
No, but one of my earliest influences was the poet Agha Shahid Ali, so I’m happy to think he’s still to be found somewhere in my work.

Do you think of yourself as a political novelist?
I’m a writer. How I should be described more specifically is something that’s probably more relevant to those on the outside than to me. I like to think that every novel I write contains many different elements to it. Having said that, I am absolutely not someone who thinks that politics is separate from the most intimate details of people’s lives—from wars to visa regulations to health care, our lives are constantly coming into contact with, and being changed by, decisions made “on high.” My novels reflect this way of seeing the world.

What do you like to do when you are not writing?
Most writing days are followed by evenings with close friends, so I suppose that’s top of the list. Though the thing most likely to turn my writing day into a nonwriting day is the Pakistan cricket team (trust me, cricket is a far more thrilling sport than most noncricket fans realize).

Read our review of Home Fire.

Author photo credit Zain Mustafa.

Author Omar El Akkad talks with Luis Alberto Urrea via email about The House of Broken Angels, the BookPage Top Pick in Fiction for March 2018.

Dear Luis,

Thank you so much for writing this beautiful book. It is wondrous, overflowing with life, and though I grew up on the other side of the planet from its characters, I felt a kinship with them and reflection of my own memories of family and home.

Below are a few questions. I apologize in advance for their long-windedness, and if they miss the point of the novel entirely. I wish you the best of luck with this amazing work, and I hope we get to meet in person one day.

Take care,

Omar

The House of Broken Angels is centered on a single sprawling family, but in many ways the novel is concerned with the ways in which we mourn and measure a life nearing the end. Did writing this book change your outlook on what constitutes a well-lived life?
As I enter my 60s, I think about this topic often. I think one of the gists of this book is exactly that—taking stock, appreciating and accepting what has gone before. It’s about the ripples: how one person’s life sends ripples out from the center of the pond and those ripples move across the surface until they reach the shore, sending smaller ripples back towards the center. Everything is touched, everything is changed, even if just a small bit. Maybe it is my version of It’s a Wonderful Life. We sell ourselves short and think our lives are too small, maybe meaningless. How lovely would it be to see all the good we have done before we have to say goodbye?

How difficult is it to produce a work of fiction when it’s modeled so closely on your own personal experience, especially when that experience is of a sibling’s death?
Not to be dramatic, but there are a couple of levels of difficulty. Certainly the pain factor is high. However, as a craftsman, I must honor the novel. It is not, after all, a memoir. That being said, my brother was a tremendous character, and at times, it seemed like he was co-writing it. I think we all, to some extent, mine personal experience in our writing. Whether it be people, events or places that we know, our lives color our writing.

I honestly didn’t see how this could be a book at first. Maybe a poem. But other people saw it. Everything transformed for me when I saw Jim Harrison a few weeks after the funeral, and he asked me to tell him the story of my brother’s death. He listened intently and then said, “Sometimes God hands you a novel. You’d better write it.” Still, it could not be a story until it could stop being the story of my own family and move into more imaginary realms.

You mentioned The Godfather as a book that influenced you greatly. What is it about the family epic that makes it so well suited to accurately describing the American experience? What do you hope readers whose cultural background might differ from yours will take away from your own family epic?
It seems to me that America as a nation has certain tropes that are sacred, like the concept of “home” and “family.” What is the melting pot but a mythological cry for us all to be some extended family? I think our task is always to show each other that we are human. Rudolfo Anaya told me when I was much younger that if I could make my grandmother in Tijuana the grandmother of a reader in Iowa through my work, I would have committed the greatest political and religious act of my life. I believed him.

The House of Broken Angels is being published during what feels like a particularly dangerous moment in American history, a moment where the scapegoating of immigrants seems even more shrill than usual. How much did the current political situation factor into your thinking when you were writing this book?
I believe there is no “them,” there is only “us.” I know it’s true because the very thought seems to cause rage in some people. The book evolved over time from an intimate novella to a wilder beast. Once the discourse was of “bad hombres,” rapists, walls, I knew immediately this was not going to be the end of it. I thought, “You are talking about my family.” And my family has been insulted enough. It was time to fight, and my weapon is words. And I had faith in my words because I knew them to be true. I spend many days now talking to Latino kids. Try it sometime, if you want to see what political damage looks like. They don’t know our country once had the same attitude toward Italians, toward the Irish. I tell them, “Just wait, they are going to get tired of attacking you, and you will grow in strength. One day, you’ll be amazed when they start complaining about those damn Norwegians.” The awful lighthouse beam will cycle around.

Finally, the last thing I wanted this book to be about was “immigration.” We, as artists, set the agenda. It’s part of our job. So what if “a Mexican-American novel” is an AMERICAN novel about AMERICANS, who happen to be of Mexican origin? Who happen to be Chicano? What then? It seems funny to me that some people still can’t get their heads around that idea.

I was struck by the deep reverence with which your prose treats the sensory experience of life. So much of the novel revolves around small miracles of taste, scent, touch. Was this something you intended to highlight before you started the book, or did it come about naturally as you were writing?
Thank you for noting that. You honestly hit on the mainstay of all of my writing. My students will either laugh when they see this question or groan in misery because I am always pushing them to find these very things in their work. It’s all about grace in my work.

Big Angel, the patriarch of the de la Cruz family, is in almost all respects a large man for the majority of his life, but is finally hobbled and brought to physical smallness by disease. There is, in his story, the potential for sadness to overwhelm all else, but the novel never retreats to that place. How did you go about celebrating as well as lamenting the space where memory and mortality intersect?
Oddly, all of my books are sad comedies. The paradox of Big Angel is that he grows larger and larger as he approaches the vanishing point. I had never been intimately involved in someone’s physical diminishment like I was with my brother’s, and my experience was nothing compared to the experience of those who dealt with his affliction on a daily basis. Even in the darkest hour in the hospital, he was utterly, grandly himself. We are all, in this family, blessed with spectacular egos, but his grip on his own myth was powerful for all of us because his personal myth extended outward into the fate of his family. This example radiated all through the fictional attempts to make sense of what you are asking. I have known many elders who surrendered to defeat. It was so moving to see a man who absolutely refused. And don’t forget that people are funny. My brother never forgot, and Big Angel doesn’t forget. So the comedy and the tragedy constantly rub against each other and throw sparks. It’s all about shadow and light. Memory and mortality.

Was it cathartic, writing this book?
Yes, it was. I would happily avoid catharsis from now on, but I think I am doomed to plumb personal soul mines. There were places I actually could not write, and my wife typed what I had to say out loud. But those scenes will just be my secret. Ultimately, writing this book brought me comfort, and I hope that it brings comfort to others as well.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The House of Broken Angels.

Photo credit Joe Mazza, Brave-Lux