Where to start with Kamila Shamsie

British and Pakistani novelist, born 1973. Won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2018.

Best Kamila Shamsie book to start with: Home Fire (2017), on 3 of the 16 lists it could have made.

Home Fire is the book to start with. It won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2018 and was shortlisted for the Costa in 2017. It is a retelling of Antigone set among British Muslims, told in five voices, and it moves fast. You do not need to know the play.

A God in Every Stone, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize and the Walter Scott Prize in 2015, is a historical novel set around the First World War, with an English archaeologist and a young man from Peshawar. Burnt Shadows, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize in 2009, begins in Nagasaki in 1945 and follows a woman across continents and decades. It has the widest sweep of the three, so read it last.