検索キーワード： 著者 "Kamila Shamsie" すべてのカテゴリー

Hasan is eleven years old. He loves cricket, pomegranates, the night sky, his clever, vibrant artistic mother and his etymologically obsessed lawyer father, and he adores his next-door neighbour Zehra. One early summer morning, while lazing happily on the roof, Hasan watches a young boy flying a yellow kite fall to his death. Soon after, Hasan's idyllic, sheltered family life is shattered when his beloved uncle Salman, a dissenting politician, is arrested and charged with treason...

August 9th, 1945, Nagasaki. Twenty-one year old Hiroko Tanaka steps out onto her veranda, wearing an embroidered kimono ahead of her marriage to Konrad Weiss. In a second of destruction and senseless violence, everything Hiroko has known and loved is decimated. The scars, both literal and metaphorical, will stay with her forever. Attempting to escape this devastation, Hiroko travels to Delhi, encountering the bloodshed of an India undergoing Partition. As the years unravel, surnames change, new places become home and old wars are seamlessly usurped by new conflicts.

Maryam and Zahra. In 1988 Karachi, two fourteen-year-old girls are a decade into their friendship, sharing in-jokes, secrets and a love for George Michael. As Pakistan’s dictatorship falls and a woman comes to power, the world suddenly seems full of possibilities. Elated by the change in the air, they make a snap decision at a party. That night, everything goes wrong, and the two girls are powerless to change the outcome.

Zahra and Maryam have been best friends since childhood in Karachi, even though—or maybe because—they are unlike in nearly every way. Yet they never speak of the differences in their backgrounds or their values, not even after the fateful night when a moment of adolescent impulse upends their plans for the future. Three decades later, Zahra and Maryam have grown into powerful women who have each cut a path through London. But when troubling figures from their past resurface, they must finally confront their bedrock differences—and find out whether their friendship can survive.

Between the eighth and 13th century, the Islamic world flourished. This 500-year period of monumental political and cultural change became known as its 'Golden Age', characterised by unprecedented advancement in the fields of architecture, invention, medicine, innovation and philosophy, which still inform huge parts of the modern world. In these 20 episodes, we hear about some of the most remarkable events and individuals of this extraordinary epoch.

In a prison cell in the US, a man stands trembling, naked, fearfully waiting to be shipped to Guantánamo Bay. How did it come to this? he wonders.... August 9th, 1945, Nagasaki. Hiroko Tanaka takes in the view of the terraced slopes leading up to the sky. Wrapped in a kimono with three black cranes swooping across the back, she is twenty-one and in love with the man she is to marry. In a split second, the world turns white.

Isma is free. After years of watching out for her younger siblings in the wake of their mother's death, she's accepted an invitation from a mentor in America that allows her to resume a dream long deferred. But she can't stop worrying about Aneeka, her beautiful, headstrong sister back in London, or their brother, Parvaiz, who's disappeared in pursuit of his own dream, to prove himself to the dark legacy of the jihadist father he never knew. When he resurfaces half a globe away, Isma's worst fears are confirmed.

Summer, 1914. Young Englishwoman Vivian Rose Spencer is in an ancient land, about to discover the Temple of Zeus, the call of adventure, and love. Thousands of miles away a twenty-year-old Pathan, Qayyum Gul, is learning about brotherhood and loyalty in the British Indian army. Summer, 1915. Viv has been separated from the man she loves; Qayyum has lost an eye at Ypres. They meet on a train, unaware that a connection is about to be forged between their lives – one that will reveal itself fifteen years later.

For centuries past, and all across the world, there are words for a certain kind of woman. Words that raise our hackles, fire up our blood. Words that tell a story. In this blazing cauldron of a book, the boldest writers of our day take up these words and take up their pen, celebrating fifty years of Virago.